Looking at the later, that individuals are busy completing their certifications in looking for better opportunities or enhancing their skill sets. The main trigger for this is organization and/or recruiters do their first level of screening by looking at certifications an individual has completed. Organizations realize the facts when the candidate appears for his/her personnel interview.

It has two sides, wherein I was also a member of the interview panel many times and I have noticed that some of them really opted for certifications to enhance their skills and some to barely put the certifications on their resumes. So the question is how do they get away by clearing their certification exams.

There are many players in the industry giving away trainings on different subjects and making their money. All they need to ensure is that the candidate has attended their course which would vary from a 3 day course to 5 and 10 days. Organization’s send in their employees to certification courses and employees treat the same as a paid vacation.

The training institutes are not effectively monitoring about how those candidates would use the skills that they have learnt in the training and apply it effectively in their organization. Their responsibility ends by providing the training and conducting an exam and in most of the cases the exams are becoming more and more liberal for the participants. The training institute would like to make it liberal because some of the participants pay this huge amount from their own pockets and in-turn they would also like to showcase the passing rates which would increase their business and the credibility of the trainer.

Organizations should:

1. Ensure that every employee going through training should be able to come back to the organization and spread his knowledge to his team. This could be done by preparing a document on how it would help the organization or by conducting internal trainings to their team mates
2. Include training outcomes as part of the employee’s appraisals.
3. Not impart trainings to their employees to just catch up with their training budgets
4. Ensure that they can a valid feedback from the trainers on the performance of the participant and this should be used as a baseline to decide if this participant can be send for further trainings.

Training institute’s should:

1. Look beyond training and certification and ensure that the organization is benefitted with the training given to their employees, by having a feedback given to the organization on the performance of the employee during the training.
2. Institute can also get a feedback from the organization based on their performance related to the training they have attended. Though this should be triggered by the training institute and for sure will increase their credibility.
3. Have a team to randomly visit venues were examinations are conducted to check the credibility of the tasks carried out.
4. Have more transparency to the participants in exam paper collection and valuation. Try and make the same more pro-metric type of exams or scenario based rather than just marking on a sheet of paper that can be manipulated.

Now coming to organizational certifications there are two categories.

1. Organizations who would like to improve their processes and have a commitment to maintain the same
2. Organizations that look just for certifications to showcase the same to their clients and win contracts

The majority of the organizations today fall into the second category. Organizations look for external consultants who can just come over, do the minimum required tasks to show the auditors that there is an effort put and get the organization certified. It is not to blame the organizations completely rather have the consultants blamed cause their primary job would be to ensure that the organization has implemented the necessary processes and is practicing the same. Consultants are supposed to be advisors by analyzing the business and recommending best practices for the organization.

Auditors also help organizations achieve certifications by just meeting the minimum requirements as mentioned in any standard and the easiest escape out of any non-conformance is to show a roadmap of implementation which can be audited in the following surveillance audits. Auditors who are not supposed to be consulting and auditing are approaching organizations with certain checklists which will help the organization in complying to certain requirements and be ready for the certification audit. The auditors will then wear the auditors cap and audit the organizations and certify.

Those organizations that fall into category 2 will take this offer as their main objective is to showcase a certificate that would bring them more clients or satisfy the existing clients. Every consultant or in-house representative of organization preach the benefits of organizational certification to their peers and one of the benefits that always comes up is that certification would give the organization an competitive edge is a “Badge of honor”. So why not wear it…!!!!

External drivers

The external drivers for organization to get certified against industry standards could be their clients or regulatory requirements. Where if the driver is the regulatory requirement, irrelevant of an organization is certified against any industry standards, auditors will verify if the actual requirements are present/implemented/practiced in an organization after which the process of validating them is completed.

In the same manner if the external drivers are the clients of an organization, those clients should make a visit to the vendors premises to physically check if the requirements as mentioned in the industry standard (against which the organization is certified) has been implemented and practiced and that they have collected enough evidence, after which they should approve to provide business to that organization.

These are my views which is out of some discussions and personnel experience. I would like to know what others feel of the same. So please let us all know about your views.