Raising The Professional Development Bar

Raising the Professional Development Bar: Why Most Coaches, Career Counselors, Business Consultants, Educators, and other Professional Developers are Not Qualified to Teach or Advise


Qualified: Having the appropriate qualifications for an office, position, or task. A quality, ability, or accomplishment that makes a person suitable for a particular position or task.

Are the professional developers mentioned in the title really qualified to advise others? In many situations, I would say No. This article is not about profession-bashing but about competence -- and the impact that the lack of qualifications is having on our credibility as professionals.

Let me cite a few examples.

Coaching is now the rage in society. We agree it has a very important role to play in contributing and accelerating a persons progress -- but a very high percentage of individuals who are calling themselves a "coach" are simply not qualified.

Many coaching associations and organizations focus on certification. Do you know certification has nothing to do with qualifications? Example: I am an individual interested in coaching. All I have to do is attend a 16-to-20 session tele-seminar and I become a certified coach!

Do you think that process makes you effective?

Many coaches have migrated from the profession of psychological therapy. A couple of years ago, I conducted a business development session for a group of 50 coaches. By the end of the day, a percentage of the group was upset. Why?

The session spent too much time on sales; they did not think that was appropriate for a business development session. I was shocked. Many of those individuals were professed business coaches.

How could you possibly consider being a business or personal coach and hate sales?!

There is no credibility in that mindset. Even more disturbing is that many of those individuals were "certified" coaches.

So lets be clear. Certification does not mean qualified!!!

Personal, business, and professional coaching got its roots in the athletic world where a coach is critical to an athletes success.

There are, however, major differences with athletic coaches. Formal training or not, they spend years earning the right to coach at elite levels. They start at the junior levels and work their way up and usually are mentored by others with experience.

Some never make the cut.

Their results or lack thereof are there for everyone to see. In the professional athletic world, coaches are held to account. You often hear on the news about a coach being fired.

This same accountability must be applied to all professional development roles.

Last week, one of our very successful entrepreneurial partners was asked to speak to an MBA graduating class. By the middle of his presentation, he saw many grads eyes glaze over. It was clear their mindset and understanding of business was woefully lacking.

Should we be surprised at this response when the instruction is coming mostly from professors without entrepreneurial or business background and no real life experience in it?

Again education does not necessarily correlate to capability. When was the last time you heard of a professor being fired or held accountable for lack of student success?

CRG recently attended HR and Career conferences.
-At the HR event, we heard that over 30% of the senior HR positions had been filled by individuals with less than 3 years of experience. Help, please!
-Many of the Career counselors confided they were not happy in their jobs. They were looking for options and were unsure what they wanted to do. How ironic!

We need measurement, accountability, and mentoring in all professional development fields, just as we do with athletic coaches. Many professions have internships or apprenticeships. Even the mechanics who work on your car have that, but little or no training is available for those whose job it is to impact us in the professional and personal development fields.

The industry associations should be responsible for these initiatives but they have shown little leadership on these issues to date. They seem more interested in certifications and designations to help fund their associations than on qualifications and capabilities.

For example, I have personally conducted over 10,000 hours of consulting and coaching in the past 18 years, but am not certified because of the significant fees and myriad programs to attend to qualify. I am too busy making a difference with people to defer to some arbitrary certification that seems to mean more to the association than to the impact with clients.


Transforming the Professional Development Industry

Professional development organizations must get past the shallow position of certification -- and get on to the essential item of qualifications. What should industry associations do to transform? Here are a few recommendations.

1.Professional development associations/organizations must stop believing that certification has something to do with competence.
2.Acknowledge that proficiency takes time and cannot be achieved by attending tele-seminars over 2 months.
3.If development is part of the mandate of our profession, we need to embrace it as part of the strategy for our own members. That doesnt mean annual conferences but in-depth processes with confirmed demonstrable abilities as part of a strong development pathway.
4.Implement apprentice and internship models.
5.Most industry designations are becoming a joke; they are in fact meaningless. Designations should have levels and detailed records of experience related to the designation. Why? So you will know if the coach has a total coaching experience of 15 minutes or 1500 hours.
6.Admit that if we want our professions to progress, some people will not make it. If you fail your annual flight physical, they revoke your pilots license. Thats the way it should be for professional developers. Many individuals who are educators, coaches, and consultants should be relieved of their responsibilities.
7.Tenure should not be part of the selection criteria.
8.Implement metrics, ongoing feedback, and measurements to confirm capabilities and results, for example, student success rates, client progress reports, constituent satisfaction surveys, and other specific outcome-based measurements.
9.This process should not become a bureaucratic nightmare of administration, but a sincere desire to serve our constituents at the highest level.
10.Allow individuals with proven track records to bypass the qualification process as long as their results and experience can be verified.

As professional developers, its time we took responsibility for the condition of our industry. If not you, who? If not now, when?