Mrs. Cad and I were comparing how professional certification is perceived by both of our industries. While education professionals value even attempting national certification and the process to become an NBCT [fingers crossed. I get my results in November], In her profession of physical security, the professional certification she hold of CPP is unknown to many and held as unimportant or even distain by a majority of people in her field. Obviously, there are more NBCTs than CPPs just due to the size of certified teaching vs. security mangement fields but strangly enough, the percent of teachers with NBCTs is smaller than security professionals with CPPs.
This started me thinking. What professional field has the lowest number of people holding the highest level of professional certification in that field both as an absolute number and as a percentage?
I assume you mean professional “certificate” programs, not academic degrees in a field.
Just an anecdote - I"m a software developer, and software development “certs” are a mess and mostly informal. Some look down on them, HR drones love them because it helps them weed out resumes, and I wonder how much a multiple-choice test is going to prove competency in the real world where theory takes a back seat to project management dynamics and the need to ship last week.
I have a cert, but it isn’t in my current area of expertise and I’m not racing to get any more.
Saint Cad: robert_columbia is correct; certification in the software world isn’t held in very high esteem among the people who write code, who are more interested in past work or, perhaps, academic achievement such as degrees and work in PhD programs. Things like MCSEs and Cisco certification mainly say you have achieved a (very) minimal competence in some company’s proprietary software, and say even less about your general knowledge than they do about how well you perform in the workplace.
In the computer science field, top people are going to be PhDs and people held in high esteem in some sub-field despite the fact they lack degrees and certainly lack certification. Counting the second group is going to be challenging.
How about tax preparers? I’m not sure how you’d define the “highest level of certification” but the vast majority of tax preparers have no certification whatsoever. Most won’t even have a degree of some kind. Only Oregon and California require any certification… and certainly don’t require EA or CPA level certification.
It might be hard to find good numbers on the percentages, though. Even if you assume that CPA is the highest level of certification, not all CPAs work in tax. Still, I’m sure there are numbers out there if you dig enough. I know the IRS has estimates of total paid preparers, and that would be where I’d start.
I am looking for professional certification and not degrees so Ph.D, Ed.D, SJD, D.Min etc are immaterial. SmartAlecCat’s example is exactly the thing I’m looking for. The example of tax preparers is interesting. If we are talking about HR Block trained then there is no (AFAIK) standardized professional certification so they don’t count. If we are talking about accountants specializing as tax preparers, then their professional field is accounting and their certification would be a CPA but that is out of all accountant - not a specialization.
I think the danger in this tread is thinking to narrowly. The OP talks about teachers and not specializations such as secondary biology teachers and the Cisco and Netware etc certifications are product certifications and not professional ones. I think that tacit in the OP is also the presumption that a field does have a highest level of certification unlike the computer science field. Think in terms of what certifications let you add post-nomials. That probably what I’m looking for (though not necessarily exclusively).
Of course there are professions with no top-certified people, like the research field I’m in, simply because no industry certification exists. In our case we’ve often discussed putting together a program of certification, but as our research institutions have such diverse needs, our professional organization has decided that certification curricula would necessarily either be too general to be of use or unable to cover everyone’s needs.
And, a “top level”, or even a hierarchical graded system of, certification(s) would seem like it would not have a lot of support or respect from programmers. The academic degree system seems to to a pretty good job of testing for abstract and theoretical knowledge (e.g. formal languages, abstract data structures, AI, discrete mathematics). The rest of being a programmer is divided into living as part of a project team, handing customer/management requests, managing time, handling disputes, and other things that aren’t programmer-specific, and the other part is the technology platforms and languages du jour which changes every 5 years. Any state, national, or international certification program that involves knowledge of concrete, hands on technology is going to be obsolete by the time it gets through all the proper levels of industry and government approvals and the first candidates take the exam.
For the programmers here, imagine if there was a “New York State Certified Software Engineer” program that required you to pass an exam on Win16 API methods, 68k Macintosh programming conventions, Apple II system architecture, and finished off with a requirement for you to write a PL/1 application that runs successfully on a 1975 IBM mainframe. Fun, and I guess it proves that you can pick up technological frameworks (either you have the theoretical foundation and learned the frameworks properly, or you are just a good memorizer), but it doesn’t tell much about whether or not I could put you on a development team that has to deliver a ASP.NET web application next month.
I worked for several years as a project manager (in a large team of project managers at a Fortune 50 company) before I learned there was a certificate (PMP) available. Last year a former colleague got one and became the first person I knew personally who had one.
I have no idea if there are other companies or industries where that certificate is common. I know that academic degrees are out of scope but when I moved over to product management I asked around to see if I should go get an MBA and was surprised to learn that even most of those who had one (about 40% of the people in positions I thought might have one) said, essentially, “don’t bother, you already got the job.”
The PMP is unfortunately both common and useless. It’s come a long way since the certification was created and it’s all been downhill. I have mine because I was out of work and it’s definitely a sorting technique used by hiring managers.
PMI has now added a higher level certification PgMP and several specialist certifications in an attempt to both gather more cash and to keep ahead of the criticism.
They don’t sound like “drones” to me, they sound like smart people applying a fairly reasonably screening process.
HR departments are deluged with resumes; going through all the applications would take more hours than there are in a week. They need to apply basic standards to get the number down to a manageable level.
It’s reasonable for them, because it’s quick and algorithmic. It’s not (necessarily) reasonable for the group that gets the screened candidates. In my area of expertise, certifications are looked on as useless or worse. We want candidates that can think, and certifications don’t demonstrate that. I’d sooner screen candidates based on how few spelling or grammar errors were on their resume (which is also a bad idea).
In practice, the best screening we have is a series of (fairly easy) technical questions written by an engineer. If they pass that they get a phone interview, and if they pass that they get 6 hours or so of in-person interviewing.