Look Before You Certify

If you’re thinking about starting a certification program of your own, it may seem like you’re just giving an ordinary training program more teeth. But there are some issues that are worth considering before you jump in with both feet.

Judy Hale says that especially if you’re using certification for a new-hire process, you need to keep in mind what it will mean for those employees who were hired before you created the certification. For example, will those established employees look less competent compared to employees who have been through the certification program? “If they’ve been getting ‘exceeds expectations’ on their annual performance reviews, you have to be very careful if you suddenly come in and say the person’s brain-dead,” says Hale, principal of Downers Grove, Ill.-based performance improvement consulting firm Hale Associates and author of Performance-Based Certification: How To Design A Valid, Defensible, Cost-Effective Program (Pfeiffer, 2000).

You also have to consider what the consequences for failure should be. For example, Hale says, some companies tire those employees who can’t pass a certification test, and some deny promotions or prevent them from carrying out certain duties. “When the employment decisions are denial of a promotion, termination or not being allowed to carry out a task of role, those are high stakes, because you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods,” Hale says. “Will you remediate them or chloroform them?”

A key task in creating a valid certification program is job of role analysis, which is identifying what employees do of produce, what they have to know in order to do it, and under what conditions they do it. This step gets skipped a lot, Hale says, because everyone thinks they already know. They also don’t always talk to everyone they should when they’re trying to find out. “The mistake that people make on certification is that they only talk to exemplars of high performers,” she says. “They are important, but they’re not the universe. You also need to talk to those internal auditors, internal customers, external customers–because they will tell you what the person should be doing, not what the person is doing.”

Hale also counsels her clients to be sure they know what they mean when they say someone is certified. Does it mean that the person knows certain information? Or does it mean that he or she can perform certain tasks? This will dictate not only how certification is verified, but also what public promises you can make regarding your certified employees. “If the promise is that people will know, then you need a knowledge test,” she says. “If the promise is that people can do, under what circumstances can they do it?”