Credentialling is Bogus

February 11th, 2012

I was doing some repair work on a printer, and I came across this dudes blog where he proceeds to shoot holes in credentials and certifications. He is 100% right on the mark with this…

Credentialling and licensing is the same stupidity that state government (often with GOP sponsors) keeps pushing towards for more and more occupations all the time. For sure, no one wants a bozo changing out medical gas cylinders… but I’m not sure that a multiple choice exam followed by each and every installer paying the state $30 every year is going to amount to a hill of beans safety wise.

The thing is, if one is really concerned about the hazards of an given occupation, the answer is not certification via multiple choice exams and huge gifts to credentialling outfits and testing firms. Likewise, the answer is not X numbers of hours of education, or a gift to some educational entity by requiring mandatory training that only they can provide…

The bottom line questions are “Can Joe safely and efficiently do the work entailed by X profession?” and secondly “Can Joe continue to do so year after year, especially as the profession changes. The challenge of course is finding this out in the most efficient way possible…

As it is right now, there is no carrot other than from competition for dollars, being the chosen educational provider gets lunch for free on fine china courtesy of politicians.

One way to force the issue would be to require bonding on the part of the educational institute, such that if Joe screws up, they have to eat the cost. Likewise, rather than paying the educational provider by the hour, tie their compensation to data driven measurements of Joe’s safety efficiency prior to the class, and then the efficiency gained post class over a 1 year period… Granted, in such a high stakes environment for the provider, a significant carrot would be required for them to take on such an approach. On the other hand, the status quo of Joe’s mere memorizing trivia and paying through the nose for a piece of paper is near useless and pretty darn expensive to boot. With huge risk, and a huge carrot, competition just might drive home really efficient and cost effective education rather than politicized money distribution disguised as education.