If there's something that bothers me during this period of explosive change, it's this:
Amidst the calls for self-upgrading, learning new skills, and modernising work / business practices, a large number of companies and organisations are relentlessly promoting their certification courses.
Everything from the too-broad-to-properly-classify Life Coaching to the supposedly-soon-to-be-indispensable Digital Design and Marketing to the pseudoscientific-cult-like NLP (I might talk about this rather insidious industry in the future).
Many of these certificates mean absolutely nothing.
Apart from the fact that you spent an exorbitant amount of money on a digital 'badge of honour'. At least, in the past, they gave you a piece of fancy paper with signatures and pretty foil circles.
I know serial certificate collectors and, when I ask them what they've done using their certificates, the answers are almost always "nothing" to "not much".
Oh, we certainly have our own local certificates that are worthless and meaningless outside of Singapore - some that 'certify' you to be training instructors for narrow-focused, poorly-designed courses aimed at uninterested individuals who attend to clock hours so they can get a payout after a certain amount of recorded time.
Others for attending these same courses and watching the clock tick by.
It’s almost baffling how certification has become a multi-million dollar industry in and of itself.
Does that mean that certificates are useless? Of course not! Some of the internationally-recognised ones are difficult to get because the screening processes are stringent and require a lot of real effort.
Some courses are truly useful and really do make the certified individual much more effective at what they are learning to do.
These are the certification courses that we should promote and keep.
All the rest?
Not worth the time.
And if you’re thinking that you can do more and better work after attending one of these courses, you might spend your time better by learning through some online courses and actually putting what you learn into practice.
Save yourself the money and stop feeding these parasites.
