Professional Certifications and Squirrel Catapults

 

This probably reflects poorly on my character in certain circles, but one of the funniest YouTube videos I’ve ever seen is footage of a sieve, attached at four points by some sort of elastic cord (they may be bungees) and stretched taught, locked and triggered in place on a table in a back yard patio. Some squirrel bait is placed in or directly in front of the sieve, and when a unsuspecting squirrel hops on the table, the sieve is released, catapulting the squirrel into the neighbors’ foliage (their little arms and tails tend to flail about in a most comical manner).

Consider the central part of the squirrel catapult apparatus, the sieve. Most people use sieves to separate items from each other, such as separating dirt from lettuce by rinsing the lettuce in the sieve. The lettuce stays, the dirty water flows out. Or, they can be used the opposite way, as when your children’s marbles mysteriously appear in the flour container. The flour falls out, the marbles stay. And, as we have seen, with a little creative use of elastics, they can separate members of the suborder Sciuromorpha from a back yard patio, in dramatic (and hilarious) fashion. (Hey! I wonder if ancient man, upon discovering the characteristics of rubber tree sap, combined this knowledge with his basket-weaving ability, and indulged in the behavior that would end up evolving flying squirrels!)

Why do we use professional certifications? I believe they are used like sieves, to separate capable people from the incapable, the educated from the ignorant, or the willing-to-fork-over-thousands from those who, well, aren’t. (Full disclosure: I have three certs, the PMP®, the CCP®, and the EVP®. If you don’t know what these are, don’t bother asking.)  If your organization suddenly pushes a certification initiative, they are probably attempting to wash lettuce in the sieve; that is, they want to rinse the ignorance out of the existing staff. Or, they can separate the flour from the marbles, and arrange to have future job advertisements stipulate the desired certification as a pre-condition for candidate consideration. Or, they can launch squirrels, as in requiring a specific certification by a date certain and, if the desired cert is not attained by then, the unlucky employee is sent flying, arms, legs, and tail flailing. As with most management initiatives, some unintended consequences often accompany an emphasis on the attainment and retention of professional certifications, including the following.

I have previously discussed in this blog the four archetypes of workers described by Dr. Michael Maccoby in his book The Gamesman (Simon and Schuster, 1978): the Craftsman, the Company Man, the Gamesman, and the Jungle Fighter.  I have no idea if Dr. Maccoby did any research in professional certifications, but my experience tells me that the two archetypes most coveted by the organization – the Craftsman and the Gamesman – might not be all that interested in professional certifications. The Craftsman is mostly interested in doing his job right, the best even, and certifications wouldn’t interest him, unless he saw them as a means to the end of attaining higher performance. And the Gamesman tends to already have an advanced grasp of his job and its environs, and seeks out risky, entrepreneurial tactics to advance himself. It seems to me that professional certs would mostly appeal to the archetypes that are either organization-neutral – the Company Man – or the type to be avoided, the Jungle Fighter. I’ve seen the attainment of professional certifications work on Jungle Fighters like catnip. It fills them with an air of technical authority, legitimately or not, and they use it to help further their favorite tactics: maximizing their rivals’ shortfallings, while minimizing their own, and minimizing their rivals’ achievements, while maximizing their own.

Then there’s also the problem of what the specific cert actually means. For example, the granddaddy PM cert of them all, the PMP®, implies familiarity with (if not mastery of) the concepts laid out in PMI®s Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge®, or PMBOK Guide®. However, the PMBOK® has an entire section on risk management which, as my regular readers well know, I hold to be nothing more than an admonishment for worrying at the macro-organizational level, tripped out in statistical jargon and backed up by invalid management science theories. But, in order to attain the PMP®, the candidate must demonstrate familiarity/mastery of such alchemy (strikethrough) techniques. Does that seem right?

Finally, at one time the PMP® could have been used as a rather effective differentiator among project management candidates; but, with over 460,000 having been issued, its ability to distinguish among truly talented managers and those less so can’t help but be dramatically reduced.

I don’t know if that particular certification, at this point, could even catapult a squirrel.