Your Qualification Was A Gate, Not An Asset

Getting qualified is partly for the learning, but partly to say that we’re qualified

The certificate we get is marketing - a shortcut that lets you skip the hard job of proving you’re any good, because an institution has agreed to vouch for you and you can put it in your bio.

And for a long time that worked really well.

The problem with a shortcut, however - it only works if the person reading it knows what’s behind it.

Most people have no idea what goes into a certification.

They don’t know whether it was two years or a long weekend, whether anyone assessed you or you clicked through some slides, whether it’s a genuine standard or a company selling a logo. They can’t tell a hard one from an easy one, because why would they?

Some of them carry real weight. An MSc implies something - the time, the scrutiny, the fact somebody made you defend it.

But it’s implied, it’s a proxy.

And proxies only hold while everyone still agrees to read them the same way.

Increasingly, consumers don’t.

They’re not comparing your Level 4 to someone else’s Level 4, they’re deciding whether you seem like someone who could actually help them - from how you write, how you answer a question, whether what you say makes sense of something they’ve been stuck on.

And the consumer is the only one who matters.

Not the governing body, not your peers, not the coaches in your CPD group chat.

I also think about how every qualification you stack makes the lane narrower.

You paid for the badge, so you’re the person the badge describes, so anything that doesn’t have that word on it starts to feel like a distraction rather than the next thing you could be doing. The sunk cost isn’t the money, it’s that qualification receipts could decide who you are.

Meanwhile the things you’ve genuinely become good at aren’t on any certificate - Running a business on your own, keeping someone honest for eighteen months, having the conversation you’d been avoiding and not folding,

None of that was on a syllabus - But all of it is what someone is actually buying.

So the job now is to market what you can do, rather than what you’re allowed to do.

If you were to read your own bio, how much of it is job title and qualification, how much of it is evidence you’re good at this