Enabling Opportunity through Professional Certifications

Five years ago, I decided to move from engineering into product management. As I applied to jobs, I noticed that most companies wouldn’t give me an initial interview because I didn’t have previous experience as a PM. It was difficult to show that I would be good at a job I had never done before.

I decided to get certified in the Scrum Agile framework to prove that I had the project and team management skills needed to get my foot in the door. Two days of courses, several hours of studying, and an exam later, I had a Scrum certification to show on my LinkedIn profile.

Getting this certification helped me transition into product management by giving me job relevant skills and signalling to employers that I had the knowledge and motivation to grow into a new professional challenge.

Recent trends show that I’m not alone in this journey. An increasing number of Americans are earning professional certifications (totaling 6% of the U.S workforce). Here at LinkedIn Learning, we’ve had over 60,000 people earn certification credits (CEUs) in the last month alone (more on that later).

Several macro trends are contributing to this. Technological advances are disrupting existing industries and creating brand new categories of work. Most (65%) surveyed Americans agree they “need more training to keep up with advances in technology.” McKinsey estimates 1/3 of recently created U.S. jobs were tech-related jobs that “never or barely existed before” and 375 million people will need to switch occupational categories by 2030 due to automation.

Meanwhile, U.S. post-secondary education (e.g. college) is increasingly expensive and less valuable due to degree inflation, leading to decreasing satisfaction and confidence in its efficacy.

The result is large swaths of professionals that need to provably upskill to make career pivots. For these working professionals, returning to school to earn a degree is often financially and logistically infeasible.

Enter the professional certification. Certifications are industry specific credentials awarded by professional agencies (e.g. Project Management Institute, The Computing Technology Industry Association). These agencies establish learning and testing procedures to ascertain that a professional has the skills required to do a particular job or work with a specific technology. Certifications are cheaper and less time-consuming to obtain than degrees and while they are not regarded with the same prestige, they result in real career growth. In a recent survey of certificate holders, most agree their certificate:

• Helped them get a job (76%)
• Improved their work skills (83%)
• Increased their pay (58%)

Certifications are so effective in closing some labor gaps that companies like Google and Amazon have created their own credentials to meet their hiring needs in fields like IT Support.

Effectiveness

At LinkedIn, our vision to “create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce” squarely intersects with professional certifications.

As a leader in the LinkedIn Learning Product organization, I am responsible for our continuing education strategy and am constantly thinking about how our product can effectively support need-to-have uses cases for certification seekers like:

• Preparing to take a certification exam
• Staying certified through continuing education

It’s hard to prepare for a certification exam

Working professionals struggle to:

• Find good preparatory material
• Get the support they need to pass
• Make time to study

LinkedIn Learning addresses these pain points by:

• Offering accredited prep courses for 33 programs with practice quizzes and exams
• Featuring study groups for 6 exams (e.g. PMI PMP) to help learners get the support of a community
• Enabling exam prep while on-the-go with our mobile and audio products

It’s hard to stay certified and on top of your field

Learning doesn’t end with a certification. Continuous learning is so important that associations often require their certificate holders earn a minimum number of Continuing Education Units (CEUs) every year.

Earning CEUs can be costly, time-consuming, and boring. LinkedIn Learning addresses these pain points by:

• Offering courses that award CEUs for 6 different programs (supporting accountants, project managers, HR professionals, IT, and business analysts)
• Recommending engaging CEU content through our personalized relevance systems
• Keeping our CEU libraries fresh with cutting edge topics and technologies
• Offering all this at a fraction of the cost of attending a multi-day seminar

There’s more we need to do

As great as certifications are, there is much more to unlocking their potential.

Certifications can be very empowering but we have to improve access to testing (not just prep and CEUs). I really like that Google is subsidizing the cost of its IT Support certification and seeing significant enrollment from traditionally underrepresented populations. This is especially important because certifications have been shown to have outsized benefits for these groups (e.g. veterans). I also think partnering with community colleges is a great way to expand access by offering certifiable job training that supplements a degree in a cost-effective way.

For all the benefits of moving cert prep and CEU learning online, some studies suggest that online learning exacerbates the attainment gap by accelerating the growth of already advantaged learners while leaving disadvantaged learners behind. Research shows these effects can be ameliorated through the social support of teachers and others. This is why I’m excited that our Q&A and Learning Groups products connect certification seekers with knowledgeable instructors and communities. My hope is that these communities can evolve to help members share and find jobs as well.

Finally, not all certifications are equally valuable. The web is filled with various discussions, salary studies, and surveys that try to separate the wheat from the chaff. As LinkedIn, we are uniquely able to identify the certifications that employers value (through our Talent products), recommend them to job seekers (through our Feed and Identity products), and then help those job seekers earn them (through our Learning products).

The Wrap

On my path to becoming a PM, I personally discovered the value of professional certifications in pivoting my career. Since then, I’ve learned much more about how they affect our employment ecosystem.

Education helps professionals build the skills they need, meet the people who will help them, and convey competence and confidence to the employers that can change their lives. Certifications are an increasingly important piece of this story, but we in the education & technology industries must do more to amplify their reach and ensure their fairness. 

Thank you for reading my first LinkedIn article!