A Skeptic’s Guide to HR Certification: Why we did it
Maybe it’s easier to start with why we didn’t want to. We each spent 8+ years working in HR without any HR certification. Nevertheless, we received promotions, job offers, etc. We were (and still are!) good at our jobs, without needing to take a test to prove it.
“If I’m honest, until I was consulting I didn’t even consider certification in HR. With family including nurses and first responders, I see vocational credentials for such life-altering privileges as essential, but as an advocate for non-traditional career pathways I am also highly skeptical of most other credentialing programs.”
We think this is probably BS
These, like many exams, don’t teach practical knowledge or represent skills learned. They are — at best — crude proxies for skill that more accurately demonstrate test-taking abilities, or — at worst — are unnecessary hoops (financial and otherwise) that gatekeep professional titles and salaries and perpetuate inequitable systems.
Most mentors of ours validated our dismissal of HR certifications. Some had checked that box earlier in their careers but eventually let their memberships lapse. Others were adamantly against them. But a surprising number of peers and mentees asked, “Really? We can just… not do this?”
Simultaneously, as the rollercoaster of the market bottomed out once again, we started noticing job-searching peers complaining that more employers seemed to be demanding HR certifications, or even HR specific degrees, in their job descriptions.
We started wondering how authoritative our bubble of anti-credentialism really was, without having even attempted the exam. How can we say “this is BS” so definitively, without having taken or passed an exam?
Exam benefits we considered
We’d be lying if we didn’t say one of the “pros” to trying this out was for prospective financial gain: most of the pro-arguments we found point to credentials leading to higher salaries.
While we are consultants (so a salary increase may not be easily measurable) we predicted an upside could be diversifying our client portfolio to include those who don’t already know us. Another benefit could be growing our network by sharing our experience, which could lead to future opportunities in the short or long term.
Of course, our hypothesis is also that this won’t lead to any tangible benefit, so we had to be prepared to eat the cost (in money and time) if none of this worked out. A few months later, we can’t definitively say if any new clients chose us because of our certification, but inbound attention hasn’t significantly changed.
Choosing a certification
Once we decided to give this a shot, the question became “which one?” The two main certifications in our field are sponsored by SHRM and HRCI. Fun fact: HRCI is a circa 1970s spin-off of SHRM, but both maintained a partnership until 2015, when a nebulous rift led to each org administering and issuing its own certification exams. Since this whole endeavor is, for us, a low-stakes experiment, we didn’t rabbit-hole too hard on this question (though it does seem like some juicy ~drama~ probably lurks below the surface!). Despite SHRM’s more prominent global brand having been ‘around’ longer, given SHRM’s sketchy record on equity issues, we chose to focus our efforts on HRCI.
Within HRCI, there were several certificate options for various levels of experience and focus areas. We selected SPHR (Senior Professional in Human Resources) because our consulting work is focused more on HR strategy, which aligns with the SPHR test. aPHR seems to be best for folks just starting out in the industry and PHR is most relevant to professionals who are working on HR operations and implementation.
“I had some imposter syndrome about trying for the “Senior” exam title, especially because I have been told many times in my career that I’m not “senior” enough. But in hindsight, it’s not really about seniority at all - the tests just cover different topics. We had to study some PHR chapters because some topics do come up on the SPHR test. But overall, PHR is geared towards folks who are more in the weeds in HR operations, and SPHR focuses more on the strategies that shape those operations. We chose the certification most relevant to our day-to-day work. It wasn’t about the overarching title.”
We’d floated the idea of this experiment a couple months earlier, and we applied for eligibility to take the exam in January 2024 to get the ball rolling. After a lengthy process for AnnE to get approval for testing accommodations (more on that in this post), on February 2nd, we finally said “let’s just do it now” and signed up for an exam on February 27.
This was a quick turnaround time. Most resources recommend 3+ months of studying, but the exam was going to be updated on March 1st, 2024. Plus, we’re particularly good at tight deadlines.
So then, all we had to do was study. More on that in our post next week!
Coauthored with Krista Lane (Headwaters HR) (cross posted here)
