Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash
Earlier in my career, I didn’t have years of experience or a strong network of working relationships. When looking for work, I played the game just like everyone else; Write a really good resume and load it up with acronyms or words that a recruiter can do a keyword search on.
Many recruiters don’t have the luxury of knowing if you are really qualified or not. They get told there is a vacancy. Their job is to help fill that vacancy as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, when needing to comb though 100 resumes to find one qualified candidate, they need a method to separate the wheat from the chaff. Queue the value of the certification!
A friend once told me,
Cost is only an issue, in the absence of value.
Value is such a subjective thing. There is both actual value and perceived value, with people paying what they perceive something is worth, not what it’s actually worth. I believe the effort of getting a certification can artificially inflate perceived value for years.
Let’s use the PMI Project Management Professional (PMP) certification as our working example.
In order to pre-qualify to take the PMP certification exam, I had to have several years of experience. I then had to pass an audit, being required to provide proof of experience and obtaining signatures from former colleagues and bosses. I then took the exam and passed. The exam was awful, as it really didn’t test my knowledge of being a good project manager. Instead, it was several hours of trick questions. But upon passing, I felt like I had really accomplished something. I leveraged the certification to get an interview, got the job, and then was an active member of the PMI community for several years. It had actual value to me. I got the return on the investment with the first job. But after getting that first job, I never leveraged the certification or the learning outcomes again. I maintained the certification because it was such a pain in the ass to get and there was such a perceived sunk cost of getting it.
I’ve helped create certifications since then. I was a track founder for Agile at Scale, for the International Consortium of Agile. I was a content contributor for Agile Certified Practitioner, for PMI. I even went so far as contributing to the Software Extension of the Project Management Body of Knowledge. I continue to see value in each of them.
But regardless of contribution, the certifying organizations still want their money. They do not care who you are or the contributions you make. So, over time, I have let all of my certifications expire, as my thinking has evolved way past the basics the certifications present and the organizations want to be paid for me to retain the certification. As an investment, there are sunk costs (that are excluded from future business decisions because the cost will remain the same regardless of the outcome of a decision) and there are relevant costs (which are future costs that have yet to be incurred). Looking at certifications as investments and not getting emotionally attached makes decision making easier.
But back in February, I was informed by Project Management Institute (PMI) that my Project Management Professional (PMP) certification, which I earned back in 2006, had been suspended for not paying the renewal fee. It was an honest mistake but I actually stopped being a paid member of PMI several years ago, as I found myself not getting any value out of the membership.
Days later, I launched a Twitter poll, where over 83% of the respondents thought,
After years of experience, there is no value in maintaining certifications.
But what are your thoughts? Do you think the Twitter poll is on point or just the voice of a select few? Do you think there is value in maintaining certifications?