Credentials as a shape of belonging

I have worked in accounting and finance since 2014 and I hold no accounting designation. Books closed, controls tested, acquisitions carried through reporting standards, payroll run for several hundred people, a portfolio of clients whose filings were my responsibility. The work happened. The letters did not.

For a long time I treated that as a gap in my record. It is more interesting than that, and the interesting part is not about me.

Look at what the route is actually made of

Take any professional body and lay out the path to membership as a sequence of events. There is an exam, or several. There is also a fee schedule. There are dates you must sit within. There is a requirement that the practical years be logged, in a specified format, under somebody the body has approved, at an employer the body has approved. There are annual dues afterwards, forever, and if you stop paying them you stop being a member while your knowledge stays exactly where it was the day before.

Only one item on that list is a test of what you know. Everything else is administration, and administration is not a weaker version of assessment. It is a different function wearing similar clothes.

The verb gives it away. You are admitted to a body. Not certified by it, admitted, which is the same word used for a country and a club, and it means what it means. A body decides who is inside it. The exam is one of the things it uses to decide, and it is the only part anybody talks about, because it is the only part that flatters everyone involved.

Where I noticed it

Not in hiring. Hiring cleared. Firms handed me the work, repeatedly, for years, which is the market saying that the competence question had an answer it was satisfied with.

What did not clear was everything that happens in the first two minutes of a relationship with somebody who does not know you. There is a version of a career where a signature block does an enormous amount of work before you have said anything, and a version where the same work has to be done by evidence, over weeks, by a person who has to keep producing it. Both versions arrive at the same place. One of them charges you for the journey and the other charges the body’s fee.

That is a membership system operating exactly as designed. It is not a scandal and it is not hidden. It is just not what the public description says it is.

The part where my own argument makes me uneasy

This is a much easier thing to write with a decade of the work behind me, and I am aware that the identical sentence means something else in a different mouth.

Somebody who never did the work saying credentials are gatekeeping is making a completely different claim with the same vocabulary, and the claim is usually wrong. The uncomfortable question is what fraction of my version is that, and I cannot get to zero on it. Nobody can audit their own motive. The most I can say is that the argument would still be true if I held the designation, which is the only test I have.

There is a second thing I had backwards for years. I read the administrative gates as the corrupt part, the fee and the date and the approved supervisor, with the exam as the honest core buried underneath. That is not right either.

A body that can lapse your membership is a body that can remove you, and a body that can remove you is the only one that can be held to anything by anybody outside it. The dues and the dates and the registry are the machinery of discipline. That machinery requires a boundary, and a boundary requires a gate, and the gate cannot be knowledge alone because knowledge cannot be revoked when somebody behaves badly. So the parts I was calling arbitrary are doing the one job the public actually needs done, and the exam, which everyone points at, is the part that could most easily be replaced with something better.

Which turns the criticism inside out. The complaint is that credentialing is a poor proxy for competence. It is a poor proxy for competence. It was never primarily a competence instrument. We attached that reading to it ourselves, because a membership boundary is uncomfortable to look at directly and a knowledge test is not.

The thing that did not follow

Knowing all of this has changed nothing about what I want.

There is a project management qualification I am partway through, and I know precisely what I am buying. A set of gates with dates and fees. A boundary that somebody else drew. Two minutes of not having to prove anything, at the start of rooms I have not been in yet.

I would have expected understanding the mechanism to reduce the pull. It does not appear to work that way. You can see the whole shape of a membership function and still want to be on the inside of it, and I think that is worth saying out loud, because the essays that explain how credentialing really works almost always end with the author declining to participate, and mine does not.