By Laurent Miéville, President ASTP
Certification has become in the last few years a recurring theme in KTT. Together with the growing interest of various young professionals eager to enter the field, recognition of experienced ones among their peers call for some kind of acknowledgement of qualified training and relevant experience in KTT. If we add the perception, mainly within the EU authorities, that our field needs to get more professional as compared to our American colleagues, it is no surprise that certification related issues are on the table.
Should we go beyond offering some basic certification linked to the successful completion of a serie of training courses for example ? Would we benefit by contributing to create and run an international, formal certification organization/process ?
On one hand a formal certification seems appealing. It could bring more clarity in a complex pool of qualifications with very diverse backgrounds. It would also help defining the shape of a real profession around KTT and could enhance the flow of certified people between private and public KTT practice. It would also support, through certified training, a more uniform way of practicing KTT, something that companies and EU authorities seem to be keen to see happen (see http://www.ttt-manager.eu for an example of formal certification effort).
On the other hand, formal certification would require serious undertakings such as the creation of an international body to define different certification levels together with their requisites. This process would draw a sizable effort from the professional KTT community to help define relevant certification levels, provide the necessary training and evaluate the certification requests. One could also argue that we should rather build on the diversity of KTT and innovation schemes in Europe and try to resist to the sirens of standardization in what remains business transactions.
On top of these general observations, specific characteristics of the pool of professionals need to be considered before deciding on the relevance of entering into a formal certification organization/process, such as for example:
1) Permeability. If it is high and not only junior but also many senior people enters the field, the necessity to offer grand-fathering schemes will arise, a challenging issue in certification (see discussions around LES –Certified Licensing Professional offering, for example on techno-l.org).
2) Heterogeneity. Diversity in skills/background/tasks in the pool of professionals will raise the complexity to define a certification title and process that offers a real added value above very “basic” certification. The different innovation systems found in each European country further contribute to fragment the relevant pool linked to a particular certification title.
3) Size. Certification schemes tend to be well fitted for large, homogeneous pools of professionals such as project management or marketing specialists. Communities with smaller, more fragmented set of profiles may find challenging to enter into the work/complexity required to benefit from a formal certification scheme.
For these reasons, ASTP has been careful in not taking a formal stand on these issues so far but rather participating in discussions with other associations aiming at clarifying further what type of certification would be best fitted for our community. We however need your feedback and for that reason we would appreciate very much if, as ASTP member, you could answer the survey that was sent to you.