Three types of Training Certificate - make sure you get the right one!

If someone says that their training "comes with a certificate", it’s important to know what you’re getting.  Here’s a quick overview

1 – Certificate of Attendance

This is almost meaningless. It just says that you have beenon a course, possibly slept through it or not understood any of it, or forgotten it all since.  Even if you had to pass a test at the end of the course, we don’t know how easy the test was, so just having attended, fallen in at the front end and fallen out of the far end doesn’t mean much.  One giveaway is that certificates of Attendance don’t have a level– see section 3 in a minute for this.  For example PRINCE2 ‘certification’ doesn’t have a level, it just means you’ve been on the course.

It might impress someone at an interview, but only if they are easily impressed.  If anything it underlines the lack of anything else. If I was interviewing someone and they showed me a load of course attendance certificates I would just be thinking “Is the best you’ve got?  No proper accredited certificates?  No actual achievementsbased on what you’ve learned?”

Sometimes certificates of attendance can count towards CPD, which is where things get more useful…

2 - CPD Certification

Some courses count towards your CPD in that they have been approved by your industry body.  Until recently, for example, only courses approved by the Law Society / The Solicitors Regulation Authority could be counted towards the CPD (continuing professional development) that you have to show every year to stay qualified.  Similarly the BMA (British Medical Association) for doctors, the Institution of Mechanical / Electrical Engineers, etc.

But CPD is a bit of a mess, every industry has a different certification body with different rules. Some have accredited providers, some have accredited courses, some allow you to count any courses towards your CPD hours, and they require differing degrees of proof (e.g. certificates of attendance, without any proof of actual learning or application of learning).  

For example the SRA recently renamed CPD “Continuing Competence” and have moved to a system of self-certification where there isn’t an exact target of hours, you just do what you think is needed and you keep a log of what you have done, for the to inspect if necessary. But they DO provide a list of subject areas that you have to be able to prove that you are still up to date with – I have made an online course to cover these exact areas. But I’ve only done it for lawyers because I was commissioned to do it,  - it would take a lifetime to do it for every profession.  And getting every course approved by every professional body would also take a lifetime!

So if you are an accountant or a financial adviser or an engineer, or running a care home, or a paramedic, I would recommend that you ask your professional body directly what their CPD rules are.  It’s quite possible that my Time Management course, or handling Difficult people course, will qualify towards your required hours or your required subjects, even though it is not expressly approved by them.

3 – Accredited Training

This one is The Business! There are all sorts of awarding bodies, (e.g. try googling CIPS, CIPD, CIMA, CIPFA, and CIM) but in the world of Management there are really only three – CMI, ILM and BTEC.   The Chartered Management Institute, The Institute of Leadership and Management, and the Business and Technology Education Council - now part of Edexcel.

If a qualification is awarded / accredited by one of those three it’s a genuine, significant qualification. It will have involved an accredited centrerunning an accredited course, and the learners writing assignments that were marked either by CMI themselves or by markers who are accredited and double checked by CMI.  Believe me, l’ve done this, and it’s not easy to get accredited and to stay accredited; only really good training providers have jumped through these hoops.   

Though oddly CMI etc don’t do much checking on the training itself (which, to be fair, is hard to measure) – their philosophy is that if you have trainers with degrees/MBAs, and if the assignments written by the learners afterwards are good enough to pass, then the training must have been good.  Just like an A-level of a degree – who knows what the teaching was like, the point is you reached the standard and you passed.

CMI, ILM and BTEC award qualifications at levels 3 5 and 7, where 3 is supervisory, 5 is management, and 7 is strategic (managing managers).  They also award different lengths of qualification: award, certificate and diploma. An award is often just one assignment, certificates are usually 2-4, and diplomas are usually about 6 assignments, which tends to take a year or two to achieve.  So you can have a level 3 diploma or a level 7 certificate - the level and the length are independent.  Levels 2 4 and 6 do exist but are rarer.  MBAs are level 8.

What’s great about these accredited qualifications is that not only is the quality controlled, but also the learners have to listen, think, apply the learning to their jobs, and then prove that they have done so in their assignment.  Is it SO much more meaningful than just a certificate of attendance.  But of course there is a cost!  Contact me if you want to know more – I work with a colleague who runs an accredited CMI centre called Crescente.

I have abbreviated the above, so please accept my apologies if there is a detail that is slightly different in your particular area, and there will doubtless be differences in other countries from the UK, but that is a quick overview of the minefield that is qualifications, and the principles will certainly apply everywhere.  I hope it’s useful.

Onwards and upwards

Chris

Chris Croft runs training courses in Project Management, Time Management, Leadership, Negotiating, and Happiness. Details at his website www.chriscroft.com

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