Certification

YOU CAN GET CERTIFIED in just about anything these days: in installing software products A through Z; in various arcane subspecialties of the computer programming field; in hotel housekeeping and food service—even in psychic ability (You call them, they ask you five questions: if you get it right, you must be psychic. I'm not making this up.). In fact, the word certification may be this decade's most overused noun.

In 1992, Marlene Pinkstaff, CAM (Certified Administrative Manager), writing in the Administrative Management Society publication CAM Update, noted that, just as “downsizing” had been a key word in the workplace of the ’80s, “certification” was likely to be the word for the ’90s. An Internet search on that word will tell you she was right. The mushroom cloud of certifications raises a question for project managers and other professionals: In a world where everyone seems to be certified in something, what's the real meaning of a professional certification like the PMP?

The Economics of Certified Skill. What are the drivers behind this runaway trend?

“Two decades ago,” says PMI Certification Manager Paul Grace, “certification was limited to relatively major industries and professions such as finance, medicine, allied health and insurance. More recently, new certification programs are being developed by professional organizations, corporations and consortia of professional organizations to provide a competitive edge for their members and employees.” Not surprisingly, competition has been a powerful fuel for organizations to develop and sell certifications of various kinds. Grace points to marketing campaigns that tout the benefits of entrusting one's financial planning, for example, to a person who has demonstrated knowledge in the area of financial planning. Corporations have also found that certified service technicians provide an important competitive advantage as consumers seek ways to ensure that services they purchase are of high quality.

In an economy that is increasingly service-based, companies recognize that employee skills—certified Grade A—are their greatest asset. Grace notes that IBM administers more than 30,000 certification examinations annually to its employees. Many other corporations, including Lotus, Microsoft, Motorola and Novell, have also created certification programs. Novell has more than 78,000 Certified Network Engineers (CNEs), and reports that an additional 90,000 candidates are in the process of working toward the credential. Microsoft offers numerous certifications based on its products. Like the PMP, these certifications provide added value to individuals, customers, corporations and professions. Unlike the PMP, they are based on very limited sets of skills derived from product lines that are temporary—to put it mildly. The rate of change in the software and computer industry is such that skills certified today may be obsolete by next Tuesday. Still, such certifications are not to be discounted: a recent issue of Computerworld proclaimed that earning a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer badge translated into a $10,000 salary boost.

Pinkstaff hit on a key connection when she paired the words downsizing and certification. In the era of downsizing, companies smashed the social contract between employee and employer with massive layoffs and reorganizations. Loyalty between employee and company is pretty much a thing of the past now, and a new generation of workers (along with sadder but wiser older workers) has rewritten the contract. Now companies offer employees a place to demonstrate what they can do, a place to gain skills and knowledge, another gold star on the resume. Most people today—especially knowledge workers—expect to change jobs many times. Yet people are herd animals to an extent, and if they aren't going to feel loyalty to the company, they want to feel a connection to something. That something, more and more, is their profession—a profession that is defined by its unique set of certifiable skills and knowledge.

“Neoguilding” is what futurist Watts Wacker calls this trend. In a PM Network interview last September, Wacker noted that, at the heart of the virtual project team, we find people who identify more closely with a discipline than with a company or a job. When work is fully projectized, individuals will come together as teams, bringing with them, like an old-fashioned toolbox, their unique knowledge, skills, experiences and credentials. Already, the paradigm has shifted enough so that when you ask someone, What do you do? they are less likely to say, I work for Acme Inc. and more likely to say, I am a project manager.

Bill Kraus, who serves on the certification board of the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) sees professional certification as a new-style career ladder. “Employees' loyalty has evaporated in response to the perception that organizational loyalty to employees has evaporated … they are more willing to be loyal to their profession and association because they see a return, in terms of what they gain from certification.” What they gain, says Kraus, is an increased ability to act as a free agent, to be married to a discipline but not to a job.

Writing in the 16 March 1998 issue of Fortune, Tom Stewart made the same connection. “Credentials,” he said, “…[have] begun to take the place of promotions.” Where an individual once might have gotten a better office, now he or she is offered a week of training or a subsidized degree or certification program. Stewart goes on to say that the new variety of professional certifications in fields like human resources and project management both make individuals more employable and mobile and tie them emotionally to their “communities of practice”—today's version of the tribe.

Stewart's communities of practice recall the eerily prescient vision of French sociologist Emile Durkheim. In 1933, he envisioned a future world where “guilds” of like-minded workers would be the only form of organization that society needed. No more geographical territories and governments, no multinational companies: only tribes of professionals linked by their devotion to craft, and linking up with other guilds to accomplish interdependent work when necessary. He'd never heard of project management and cyberspace hadn't been invented yet. But he saw this as the logical extension of a professionalized society.

Job, Occupation, Profession. The explosion of certifications, then, has three economic/social drivers: the individual's quest for employability in a volatile corporate world; the customer's demand for something by which to judge the worth of service professionals (in service-based industries, there is no concrete product, so you need intangibles to demonstrate your value); and the company's need to one-up the competition by investing in its intellectual capital.

All these are equally valid drivers of a social trend. But all certification programs are not equally valid. How, then, does an individual, a customer, or a company evaluate and compare these certifications? When it comes down to Candidate A with a PMP and Candidate B with some other brand of alphabet soup behind her name, what separates the wheat from the chaff?

To answer this, it helps to take a quick look at what certification means to a profession—and what it means to be a professional.

If certification is an overused word these days, says PMI's Ex-Officio Chair Ron Waller, who has studied the process by which professions grow and acquire status, profession is just as bad. Everyone from baseball players to plumbers claims to be a professional. What's the world coming to? Actually, no place that it hasn't been before. Many scholars think that we are in just one leg of a long cyclical pattern in which occupational groups professionalize themselves, rise in influence and prestige, then fall only to regroup and rise again.

The very word profession dates back to Roman times, when every citizen was required to declare—profess—his occupation for tax purposes. So, in its infancy, the word profession applied to all forms of work.

Later, in medieval times, the first professional associations—the guilds—came to prominence. The guild system operated much like today's associations: they provided craftsmen and artisans with a “community of practice” and a set of agreed-on standards for things like quality and measurements. Membership in a guild “certified” that a weaver, glassblower or brewer was a respected practitioner of a craft or trade. In return, the worker identified much more strongly with his or her guild than with customers or employers. Guild members were very much professionals in today's sense of the word:They belonged to a livelihood that required long study and apprenticeship and which was governed by a body that regulated entrance, training, relations with fellow members, and defined the standards of the work.

With the advent of the Industrial Age, the guilds faded away as new industries cropped up. All that was left of the “professionalized” society of feudal times were the so-called “learned professions” of law, medicine and theology. These stood in lofty isolation far above the mere occupations and trades: only gentlemen practiced “the professions.”

Naturally, society being the yeasty thing that it is, this state of affairs didn't last long, and soon the lower branches of the professions—the apothecaries and attorneys who did the real work—were clamoring for recognition. Engineers and accountants weren't far behind. Elitism began to erode as the definition of profession broadened. Once transplanted to the Americas, the learned professions hit a new low. An egalitarian society refused to provide any legislative support to professional elitism—even medical doctors had no special legal status for a period in the mid-1800s. Nobody—and everybody—was professional in those heady times.

Slowly, the core professions reestablished themselves and soon, as before, began to have their primacy challenged by would-be professions.

In the 1920s scholars began to take an interest in the professions as a social phenomenon. What was a profession, exactly? How could it be defined? What were the steps that an occupation had to go through to reach professional status? These questions have intrigued social scientists throughout the 20th century. While there's a good deal of disagreement, most scholars agree that a profession has at least three core characteristics that distinguish it from other kinds of work:

■ A body of knowledge

■ A code of ethics that governs behavior toward each other, clients and society

■ A recognized authority, such as a professional association, to which members of the profession concede the right to evaluate, test and regulate their work.

Since the body of knowledge is a key element of a profession and associations exist in order to determine who is qualified to “profess” to be a member of the in-group, there must be some way of measuring a person's grasp of that knowledge. That measurement is the certification process, or in some cases, licensure.

Thus, in the evolution of an occupation into a profession, the steps are: the development of a body of knowledge, amassed over time by practitioners; the formation of a professional association; the establishment of a code of ethics and a certification program. In its maturity a profession not only certifies but also gains the cooperation of government to require licensing, thus controlling competition and assuring itself a place in the sun.

In other words, certification is the capstone of a true profession. As such, it's serious business: creating a true professional credential is no simple matter.

Linking Knowledge and Skill. Many professions are in the same evolutionary stage as project management. A notable example is the quality management profession, as represented by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Like project management, the quality profession has grown from a technical specialty to a management imperative. Over the past 20 years, ASQ has kept pace with its members' changing worklives by offering numerous certifications. Another similar association, AACE, offers certifications to cost engineers and cost consultants. Like the PMP, these certifications can be considered true professional credentials because they are based on a specific body of knowledge and—even more important—because they have used job analysis to link the questions on the certification exam to the actual situations encountered in professional life.

“The public doesn't usually understand this,” says Paul Grace. “The primary difference between a real professional credential and a mere certificate is the validity of the process and of the examination: Does it measure what it is supposed to measure? Is it suitable for the profession?” The job analysis, he explains, is the anchoring document, which establishes a logical and defensible relationship between what the exam measures and what a PMP could expect on a project. From the job analysis, an exam blueprint can be developed that specifies exactly what type of questions and how many should be asked about each knowledge area (PMI's Exam Blueprint can be viewed on the Web site at www.pmi.org). According to Grace, the PMP certification is the only project management certification that is based on a job analysis.

“The job analysis,” stresses Grace, “eliminates any arbitrary or capricious nature from the exam process. It makes the certification a public assurance of what the field believes is necessary to know in order to practice. If you are a consumer—an employer—it assures that the certification is a reasonable estimation of what this individual can do.” Grace advises that in evaluating any professional certification, the most important question to ask is: How was the validity of the test established?

“The American Psychological Association has standards that organizations are expected to use in developing exam requirements, as do the EEO and the Fairness in Testing Standards Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation (CLEAR),” Grace says. “PMI has those standards to rely on to construct its program. If challenged, we can be measured against those standards.”

Yet, as with any complex matter, there's plenty of room for disagreement about certification. One of the hottest topics in project management certification has to do with what the exam measures: knowledge or competency?

Who's Certifiying What? PMI's certification exam is knowledge based: it measures a candidate's knowledge of project management, as published in the body of knowledge document, the PMBOK Guide. Thus, what it certifies is not the project manager, but the person's project management knowledge.

This may seem like semantics, but it's an important distinction, according to Paul Grace. “The use of the word competency is misleading, in my view,” he says. “Organizations that claim to certify competency of practitioners will be challenged on that.”

While some other organizations have been critical of PMI's knowledge-based exam, Grace explains that PMI is being cautious in making claims of certifying competency, and for very good reason. “To be truly competent is a powerful statement to make,” he says. “There are so many factors in the equation of a competent practitioner. You can't use a single measure. What we are doing at PMI is continuing to develop other assessments to include in the certification process. Competency certification is a goal to work toward, but at the present time it just simply isn't feasible.”

Ron Waller agrees. “There are basically three components of competency: knowledge, behavior (decision-making, ethical conduct) and the things you are able to achieve—such as constructing and maintaining close team relationships. It gets very difficult to assess those achievements in higher-level work.” Waller points out that the current drive to assess competency stems from government initiatives in the U.K. and Australia to improve productivity, initiatives that were originally targeted at vocations rather than high-level professions. “It's easy to measure the competency of task-based jobs,” Waller argues, “but management jobs are much more difficult. It's easy to develop a competency measure that says,‘You have to be able to measure the voltage at this level with this tool and record the results. …’ But to take that concept to higher levels, it gets very difficult. Competency assessment is much more germane to entry-level types of employment.”

Waller's comments echo those of Paul Grace. “If an organization said someone was competent, they'd be warranting performance,” says Grace. “But what if that person has a medical condition that affects decision-making? What if the assessment didn't expose him to every possible scenario? He may be competent in certain areas but not in others.”

Waller points out that the behavior aspect of competency is just as difficult to assess as the achievement aspect. “What if someone is successful but not ethical? Are they then competent? It's very complicated. I'm supportive of the approach of certifying competency, but the reality is, we know nothing about how to do that.”

One problem with competency assessment is that the range of types of projects that project managers work on is so vast. A project manager on a billion-dollar project needs a completely different skill set from that of a project manager of multiple small projects. At the low end they need significant technical skills. As projects get bigger, they need more and more general management skills. Yet both are professionals.

Dr. Harold Kerzner, a provider of certification exam study courses, notes that the competencies required of project managers are changing rapidly. “What will be required of the project manager in the 21st century is a knowledge of the business they are in, along with risk management and integration management skills,” he says. Since these skills would vary from industry to industry, they would be very difficult to certify. He supports the knowledge-based exam. “What you are certifying is the knowledge of project management principles,” he says. “And those principles remain the same even while the required competencies may change.”

Paul Grace sums up the PMP in this way: “The goal is to collect as much data as possible on a person, to verify that he or she has so many years of education, X number of experiences, and examination based on a valid document. This creates a snapshot, or a benchmark. We can at least say that, on a given day, this person demonstrated that he or she was knowledgeable.”

Onward and Upward. Professionalism got a bad rap in the 1960s and ’70s; professions were viewed as elitist, closed societies resistant to change and new ideas. Today the professionalization of fields like quality, project management and software engineering seems to be serving just the opposite purpose: fountainheads of change in business and society, the new professions question the status quo and introduce new ways of organizing and managing.

Certification plays a role in that process by helping to convince the world of an individual's or a profession's value. Bill Kraus of AACE says that stream flows both ways: “Along with all the other advantages of personal advancement, a legitimate certification program helps to set and advance the standards for the profession. People who care enough not only about themselves but also about the profession have stepped forward and are participating in helping to develop standards by which the profession is judged. They both create that standard and represent that standard. [It's] a pretty ominous responsibility … someone who takes the trouble to become certified … has a responsibility to act accordingly because regardless of whether they intend to be or not they are looked at as role models by others in the profession, by clients and employers alike.”

Professionalism can be a stern taskmaster. Sally Harthun, manager of certification for ASQ, says that while ASQ's certifications are now being sought after by employers, there's a downside: people occasionally call to say they lost their jobs because they couldn't pass the rigorous certification exam. “That's hard,” she confesses. “I never know what to say. But that's the point of having an exam: not everyone can pass it, nor should they be able to.”

CERTIFICATION AND PROFESSIONALISM go hand in hand and reinforce each other in the marketplace and in the personal lives of the practitioners. This can only be a good thing for the consumers of project management and for the end users of the projects and products they create. An evolving and rigorous certification program is the hallmark of a thriving profession, as well as a personal feather in the cap of an individual. And if Durkheim was right, it might also be the door to a brave new world. ■

Jeannette Cabanis is special projects editor for PMI Headquarters Publishing Division. She can be reached at [email protected]