HR Professionals and Employers Place Value in Professional Certification

June 29, 2010 – Sixty-two percent of the U.S.-employer and 82 percent of outside of U.S.-employer respondents consider professionally certified employees to have a strong impact on a company's profitability and that most professionals and employers feel that the demand for professional certification in the HR field will grow in the next three to five years. The survey of more than 1,500 HR professionals was conducted by the HR Certification Institute and B2B International to understand the awareness, perceptions, and value of HR and other professional certifications, certificates, and degree programs by organizations of varying sizes. “Staying abreast of the opinions and values of HR professionals and business leaders around the world is a key objective for the HR Certification Institute,” said Mary Power, executive director. “In this survey, we focused on value — to the professional, to organizations and to business. As we all know, in a weak economy the candidate pool is, unfortunately, much bigger. Employees and employers must find critical differentiators to help sort among job candidates, so we wanted to see where the value of professional certification fell in the spectrum of differentiators.” More than half (56 percent) of respondents who are in charge of an HR department believe that having professionally certified employees has a positive impact on the profitability of their organization. Ninety-six percent of employers feel that an HR certified candidate applying for a job would have an advantage over a non-HR certified candidate while 69 percent state that an HR certified person being considered as an independent consultant for an HR department would have a 'very significant' advantage over a non-certified individual.