S2, Episode 3: Are HR Certifications Worth It?

In this episode of HR Peep Show, hosts Claire Baker, AnnE Diemer, and Krista Lane debate whether HR certifications are a worthwhile investment and what they actually measure. They argue the exam largely rewards memorization of laws and “right answers,” much of which is easily searchable and may quickly become outdated, and that certifications can reinforce low legal standards rather than teach how to build better workplaces. The hosts emphasize that strong HR judgment comes from experience, curiosity, research skills, values-based decision-making, and comfort with ambiguity, and that certifications are at best a baseline signal—not a reliable indicator of competence.

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Transcript

Krista Lane 0:00

Welcome to HR Peep Show, where we pull back the curtain of life in human resources in the United States. I'm AnnE Diemer. I'm Claire Baker. I'm Krista Lane, and we are your hosts. We may be new to podcasting, but not when it comes to people work. We are each fractional consultants at the intersection of people and operations with a collective several decades of experience both in-house and consulting under our belts.

Claire Baker 0:25

So today I thought that I would stir the pot a little bit. And um I was talking to somebody recently who was getting an HR certification. And we were discussing what sorts of career opportunities this would open up for them and um the types of certifications that were available and whether it was a good investment of money. And so today I wanted to talk among the group about what do people who work in HR and PeopleOps actually think about these certifications? Are they valuable? Um, do they actually say anything about somebody's competence? And why not? Let's go. Yeah, let's let's rip. What I will throw out to the group to start out is you two have HR certifications. I do not. What did your HR certification teach you?

Krista Lane 1:40

Yeah, AnnE and I kind of did this as an experiment because we wanted to answer this question of like, are certifications valuable? And if so, why and what does it teach you? Um I would say I learned more from the process of studying for the certification than I did from the certification itself, which maybe is true of most certifications, right? They're just like a check that you studied all the things that the test is supposed to cover. Um but well, the short answer is I learned a lot of laws. And in my opinion, like just learned how low the bar is on how things are in the nation of the United States. Um we both operate out of California, which has much stricter employee protections, and so well, all three of us do. Um, but we also support other clients and and multi-state companies. But in any case, like we always advise like go with whatever the strictest of state is that you operate out of. Um, so it was impressive to me to learn just how low the bar is, legally speaking. Um and I also learned how arbitrary some of that, some like the like the whole concept of the test is just like, do you have memory of these specific facts about like which law covers this particular right or what's the legal minimum or whatever for harassment or for, you know, things like that. Um yeah, that was my overall impression. It's just like a lot of memorization, a lot of facts that are easily Googleable um or otherwise easily findable. And my takeaway is that like the bar is really low and that we can do better as a country and as uh individual companies to have more human-focused work.

Claire Baker 3:43

Well, should we like actually name what certification you got, or should we not name names?

Krista Lane 3:51

Sure. We we had a whole like thought process about what certification to pursue. Ultimately, we felt like, and I don't I don't want to speak for AnnE, but at least my conclusion was that um SPHR was going to be the the one that was the most relevant to our work. That stands for senior professional in HR through HRCI. HRCI broke off from being part of SHRM, is that Society for Human Resource Management or something like that, um, which at the moment, I mean, really for decades, has had a terrible reputation um for being very ironically anti-employee. Uh that, you know, they like they've got lawsuits and stuff. Anyway, I don't want to poke that bear, but um, the point was that we felt like uh the SPHR was a more apt certification that could be useful for our needs of the one of the ones we were shopping around.

AnnE Diemer 4:46

Um there's two main HR certification orgs. There's a lot of places you can learn about HR, but there's two you can get HR certifications for from, and that's SHRM and HRCI. And what we learned about SHRM's is it was a little more of the kind of like general approach to HR. And that's not something Krista and I felt like we needed to learn or be tested on. That was something we're pretty good at. And I'm also not going to take advice from an organization that is openly racist with some of their policy recommendations. So, like, SHRM was not going to be a good fit for us. HRCI was a little bit more compliance focused. There's a little bit more focus on the laws, and we felt like that was going to complement our existing skill sets. And so that's why we went with that one. And I think this is a good way to circle back to like, what do I feel like I learned or what I got from my certification? And in some ways, I got some like compliance learnings, but it was a lot of stuff I feel like I already knew from doing the job. And the things that I did learn was like there was a whole chapter on how to prevent unionization. And so I quickly texted that to all my friends who are organizing unions and was like, hey, here's how HR is gonna try to prevent you from making a union. So I think some of that was really interesting. But more than anything, I just learned that I do like learning and I want to keep learning. I don't necessarily want to learn for an exam that I have to sit for. I don't want to learn how to bust a union. I don't want to learn minimum expectations for child labor laws. I want to keep learning, but learn how to make workplaces better. And I don't feel like the certification taught me that.

Krista Lane 6:33

Yeah, the unionization one was that was bonkers rough. Anyway.

Claire Baker 6:38

I mean, part of the reason I don't have a certification is because I just feel like organized education is more about gatekeeping than it is about like actually giving people opportunities.

AnnE Diemer 6:52

Yes.

Claire Baker 6:53

And like as Krista brought up, this is on Google. You can find it for free. But the other thing is that to be able to test people on it, there has to be kind of a right answer or a wrong answer. Or, or the exam just doesn't exist, right? Like it's just impractical to test people in any other way other than like multiple choice, you know? And that sets the expectation that there is always a right answer and a wrong answer in every situation. And it de-emphasizes judgment and it de-emphasizes the ultimate goal that you're trying to go for relative to the compliance obligations. And I I think that you wind up with a better result if you start with what are we going for, and then what are the constraints we have to work in. And if you start with the constraints, you just wind up with a whole bunch of rules that nobody knows why they're there, but they feel unassailable. And it just, I just think it's a terrible experience. And like my least favorite thing is when I'm working with another like HR person, and they tell me that something has to be some way because there is a law about this. I'll I'll give you an example. Um, there was, I was writing a parental leave policy once, and for reasons that I don't agree with, this employer wanted to discourage intermittent leave. Um, and they had people in New York and California, and this other person that I was working with like came along and was like, well, actually, um, you know, New York and California, like you have to have intermittent leave. And I'm like, yeah, you have to allow it. That's true. That does not actually dictate how the company pays people for that leave. And this person, in my opinion, was was so focused on the trivia of it that they weren't realizing that there are moments when the rules apply and don't apply, and and you can be in compliance by sidestepping the rules. And that does not mean that you're breaking the rules. And often that means you are being more generous than the rules. And I will get off my soapbox in a minute, but I think that by kind of like giving people the idea that there's this one right answer, you're setting the bar super low. And if the if people were coming in without that rubric idea to begin with, that they might make different choices that would be better for everybody.

AnnE Diemer 10:01

Absolutely. And I think everything you just said was such a good example of this because you don't have an HR certification. And yet, when I have my compliance questions, especially when it comes to parental leave or some things around payroll, you're the person I go to and you haven't learned it for a test. You've learned it because you've done it. You've learned it because you do good research, you've learned it because you have Google. And you know it's more important almost that you know when to look things up than you know what the answer is. Like you know, if someone's asking about parental leave to say, what states are we talking about? Let me go look those up first. And that to me feels so much more important than knowing right answer, wrong answer in each state.

Krista Lane 10:43

Yeah. Like a lot of times we in other functions in business, we think about what, like we start with the goal and then we figure out how to get there. Um, and I think HR should be similar, right? Like we we identify like what are we going for? What are we trying to achieve? What is the employee experience we want? What is within our budget? What are the trade-offs we might be considering with different options? Um, and then how do we get there? So yeah, like it's one of those things we like borrow from other disciplines or should borrow from other disciplines is like rather than starting with like what you can't do, like figure out what you're trying to do and then work backwards from there.

Claire Baker 11:24

Yeah. Well, and I think uh I and I want to hear your opinions on this. Um, but I think a lot of the HR coursework out there, and I like I have done HR courses, I just don't have a certification, um, is teaching people about business concepts that if you are in kind of a traditional career track where you start at the bottom of a big org, like you're just not exposed to those decisions and you have to learn them somehow. Um, but certainly for me and probably for you too as well, like I've been in startups, so I was just like exposed to those decisions anyway. And so thinking about like human capital management in the sense of like there's this entire warehouse of hundreds of workers somewhere across the country and thinking of them in units that way, like just does not feel relevant to me anyway. And I think that um, you know, that coursework is meant for every and any situation as well. And it doesn't necessarily help you make m better business decisions in whatever environment you're in.

AnnE Diemer 12:41

Yeah, completely agree. It's like unless I am doing a certification and HR for startups versus HR for nonprofits versus HR for nonprofit startups versus foundations, like it varies widely. And I think the other thing you said there is really important that you can have an HR education without having an HR certification. Like we all do learning, we all go to talks, we go to conferences, we read books, we listen to podcasts, we do a podcast.

Krista Lane 13:16

We also pay attention to our clients.

AnnE Diemer 13:19

We also pay attention to our clients. Yes. We engage with employees, we think creatively. All of those things are our HR education. And as a person who has a certification, so little of what I use actually came from the certification. And so people who use that as like a metric to like check a box, well, they don't have a certification, they haven't done the HR learning, you don't know that. You're not measuring that. It's not measuring the right thing.

Krista Lane 13:48

I do think that there's scenarios in which a certification can be helpful, but I don't, I don't think they're necessary. Like if someone's earlier in their career and is like curious about kind of what the uh compliance landscape looks like if they want to learn the lesson about how low the bar is on federal restrictions. Um you know, that is one way to do it. Do you have to spend $600 to do it? No. Um, or however much it is these days. So like it's kind of like uh like there's a big conversation about credentialism in um kind of the boot camp boom of um like about 10 years ago, where boot camps were really popular and there were a lot of software engineers coming out of them, some better than others, and there were a lot of really not better as humans, obviously, better skilled. Um and uh so there was a lot of conversation from you know, me having been working in the university recruiting space, like, what is the difference between like a university degree and going into a new grad position and someone from a boot camp going to a new grad role also? Um, what are the skill gaps? What are the things that we're thinking about? It's like it forced us to have some real conversations about like, oh, like the we actually do really value the practical skills that a bootcamp education can offer, um, that an academic education did not in a university setting for many of the new grads that we were hiring. And we just didn't realize that that was a skill gap we were filling. Well, anyway, I'm kind of deviating from the point, but really it's like thinking about credentialism in general is like you don't have to have a college degree for every job. You don't have to have a certification to do this job, certainly. Um, it is like for some people, it can be the kind of structure and regimen that helps someone get to some place in a way that they might have struggled to do independently on their own. Um, but all of the information that they need is available by experience or by the internet for free. So Yeah.

Claire Baker 16:01

So I mean, you bring up a good point, which is one that I wanted to I wanted to talk about, which is like whether you have a certification or not, how do you develop that judgment that actually makes you good at the job?

AnnE Diemer 16:17

When I get it, I will let you know and then I'm gonna be great at HR. But until then...

Claire Baker 16:23

shut up.

AnnE Diemer 16:26

No, I think I learned from some really smart people. And most of my like best practices of HR was just watching how other people navigated situations, and then sometimes it'd be like, okay, I'm gonna do it that way. And sometimes I was like, well, when I'm in this situation in the future, I will not be doing it that way, and like finding that balance.

Krista Lane 16:51

Um yeah, I mean, discernment and judgment are like the two like most critical skills, I think, of the job. Um because it's not just about what to do, it's also in some cases about what not to do it or say, right. And and the circumstances could be different. I could react, I could do exactly the same thing for two very different reasons, or I could take exactly the same situation and handle it completely differently, depending on the context. Um, and and like a lot of that comes from experience um and observation and like what is available to you at the time. And it's not all from this discipline, too, right? Like some people talk about like the chicken egg problem of like, oh, well, everybody wants experience in HR, but how do you get it without being, you know, but I've I've found I I learned a lot from just observing how other departments function and how they handle decisions, how they handle hard conversations, like what are the decision-making frameworks? Like having a really strong set of values and like mission, it sounds really cheesy and it is definitely problematic when the common behaviors and culture of the organization do not match the values and mission of the organization. But when they are in alignment, that is a really powerful North Star that guides everybody's decision making and judgment. But that was probably the earliest experience I had of like building that discernment and judgment skill was constantly asking myself, like if I decide X or Y, like does X meet our values, does Y meet our values? Um, does one meet them better than another, or in a more justifiable way than another? And building that into the decision framework was was a really powerful way for me to build that skill in my in-house experience.

Claire Baker 18:48

And I mean, I think just approaching each situation with curiosity and not coming in like you have all the answers because you took a test once. And I have given entirely different advice to the same question because it is not the same question in those two different orgs. And and so I I think this is good career advice for anybody. But um, if somebody asks you a question saying, that's a really interesting question, I don't know the answer, I'm gonna come back to you on that. Um it is, I mean, that's where I have learned most of my stuff is not putting not putting pressure on myself to come up with an answer in the moment and then actually going and Googling it. Or um, you know, my favorite HR resource, which is like the actual government website, um, because like this information is free. They want you to have it, uh, but you know, not everybody likes to read that stuff. Um, so I I think like what what traits do you need to be successful in this line of work if you do not have a piece of paper to validate it? Or if you do.

AnnE Diemer 20:17

That's a good question. I think it depends, which is a bad answer.

Krista Lane 20:24

Oh, but it's like the most common answer of anything, right? Clients get tired of me saying it too.

AnnE Diemer 20:30

But it depends on like what type of HR you're doing. If you're doing HR for a media company, you're going to need to show up differently than HR for a bank. So I'm trying to think about like what are things that are across all of them. I think the best HR, I really like what you said, Claire, about being curious. I think the best HR is curious and can bring some empathy to a situation. I think patience is really important. None of these things were on the certification exam. I don't even know how you test for any of these things.

Krista Lane 21:09

Claire, you earlier you said something that I think was a really powerful reminder too of like the shortcomings of a certification, which is that like there is often not a single right answer to any given question or scenario. Um, so it can feel very constricting to like be put in a situation where you're answering a multiple choice question and there's supposed to only be one answer, and you're like, well, depending on the situation, I might choose C over D, but depending on a different situation, I might go the other way around. Um I agree with curiosity. I think uh like a growth mindset is related to that, like thinking, you know, we don't know everything and every situation is gonna be different. Um you gotta be really comfortable in the gray areas. There's a lot that is that is not black and white that is um very different shades of gray and you know being comfortable with being uncomfortable um is uh those I feel like all of that is related to and you and you don't have to come in with all of these either like I feel like a lot of these I learned in the process.

AnnE Diemer 22:22

I definitely did not come in being comfortable with the uncomfortable. I'm still not totally comfortable with the uncomfortable I'm getting better at it. So I think these are things you have to be open to learning. You don't necessarily need to have them all day one right.

Krista Lane 22:38

Yeah I used to be extremely non-confrontational. I have grown to see how harmful that can be so uh I'm certainly a lot more comfortable having hard conversations than I used to be. You just kind of learn and grow with every every experience that you have um and see even like there's a probably everybody's this might be more of a style difference than a skill or trait. But I find that it can be very useful for me to be like the calm in the room um especially when so usually I'm I'm coming in where there's like a lot of heightened emotions, a lot of uh difficult situations happening being like a calm present person um can be really stabilizing and seeing people like actually being there for somebody and not just in a I'm your friend. Like you don't have to be somebody's friend you don't have to be somebody's savior. You can be a person who is listening and sometimes I'm a vault and I will never say what anybody said to me to anybody else. And sometimes it's a coaching opportunity, you know, you never know what you're gonna get but um being a a reliable and trustworthy person that people can come to who um you know can can help bring the temperature down in a room is is really valuable too.

Claire Baker 24:05

Yeah I I'll I'll speak from myself as a self-taught person who thinks I do a good job sometimes. Like I like

AnnE Diemer 24:14

You do a fantastic job all the time.

Krista Lane 24:17

Yes, I agree. Even when you think you're not.

Claire Baker 24:21

Uh, gross. But I like I think that in anytime I'm facing a new situation I just think could somebody could somebody be mad at me for taking the decision I'm about to make and would they have a point and would I be able to answer that with confidence and still stand behind my decision. And usually like usually if there's a a moment where I'm like yeah somebody could disagree with this, the law has an opinion on that. And so like that is the moment that I go to Google because it's it's the stuff that you don't know about that gets you. And so like if I'm just asking myself that question and thinking like what would somebody who disagrees with me say um I just I literally go to Google and I type in like "whatever type of decision I'm making" and "wherever the company is" and "law." And it and it comes up with something and sometimes it's just that this jurisdiction doesn't have an opinion on it. There are usually other states and other laws that come up under that in Google. And that just kind of tells me what the contours of laws about this type of thing look like. And now I have that in my mental map of things that I should look for in the future. And so the more of those you have like the more high fidelity your mental map of what the laws probably look like becomes and you can navigate within those decisions and just know when you're probably getting close to the line and you should look it up and when you're probably safe and you can just focus on like whatever the person in front of you is asking you to do and just like let your conscience be your guide.

Krista Lane 26:23

Yeah the like odd cheat code for being compliant is is it the human choice? Because the bar is so low. That's like the one benefit of the legal bar being so low is that if you make a a more human choice, it's probably more compliant than whatever the law says

Claire Baker 26:40

I'll say sometimes though that like sometimes people complain about stuff that is unsustainable if you were to give them everything that they want. And so sometimes you just you need to be able to draw a line and the law tells you where the line can be.

AnnE Diemer 27:02

I'm pro-laws. Yeah I'm very pro-laws. Happy to have I just don't I just don't think we need to have them memorized. But I do think having like so many policies in place and being able to default to the state with the most employee protections, I think that's all like really helpful. And honestly I took my test two years ago some of the things on that test aren't even relevant to the laws that I'm dealing with today because they're constantly changing. So it's not necessarily the best measurement. Maybe I was great at HR two years ago but if I haven't kept learning if I haven't kept up with you know rules about when you post salaries and what states that's required and things like that, like that I'm not that good at that anymore, but I do still have a valid certification. So it just doesn't seem like a good measurement. But I am but I am pro laws and policies for sure.

Krista Lane 27:52

I certainly don't think that companies should be requiring certifications. And if they are they should be sponsoring them. But I don't I don't think that it's an effective measure other than like it like if we already know that the legal bar is so low, like that's maybe what the HR certification bar is. It's that it's like it's a it could be a baseline that maybe is helpful for you to build a framework from, but it's the floor, not the ceiling.

AnnE Diemer 28:23

I think require a certification if the person in this role is going to need to memorize and take tests in stressful weird environments. That's all the certification I think tests for is like all it proved is that I could memorize things and I could be in this very cold weird room and have two hours to complete a test and I did it. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna be good at HR. So like don't require it unless that's like super relevant.

Krista Lane 28:55

Yeah I I could see an I could see an environment and I don't work in these environments, but I could see a situation where like maybe a union would require that there be somebody like certified in HR for the for the employee's benefit. But I I think I've more often seen where they just require that somebody is designated as an HR representative but that person may or may not be fully in-house in that way. But I again I don't think it's really that valuable in the end of the actual practice.

Claire Baker 29:26

But then with a union you also like the rules that you have to follow are a lot more defined. And so it makes sense to test on that as opposed to just general labor anywhere in the US or outside the US maybe often.

AnnE Diemer 29:47

Although maybe if unions knew what was on that test about anti-union behavior, they might not want to require that but I've worked at places with unions and they did not require me to have a certification to come in. And even if you do have the certification it's kind of like we were talking about with different industries or different companies is it's not really about the laws, it's about your collective bargaining agreement specifically and the test isn't on a collective bargaining agreement. So I I don't think that would necessarily be an advantage. The important thing is when you start the job, read that collective bargaining agreement, which by the way, great read, highly recommend.

Krista Lane 30:28

Yeah. Yeah I mean anything that gives you a certificate that says you did this, um, all that's signifying it's a proxy for all of the experience and all of the uh research that you might have done to achieve it. And it's supposed to represent some level of skill or education. The practical realities of that are very different in like I understand in certain trades it absolutely makes sense. In a medical context, I would like my MD to have completed their MD. Right. But but those also represent very practical skills that they have demonstrated competency in. Whereas there is not as easily identifiable such a skill set that you can quantify in an exam setting in our field. So it just doesn't feel as well translated.

Claire Baker 31:23

Not to mention that SHRM maybe does not have the credibility that some would desire in this particular area and their stamp of approval. People who have SHRM certifications, many of them are wonderful. Like this I'm I'm not talking about the people who hold the certifications but like as an organization um if you cannot live what you're testing people on, then I don't know that like that stamp of approval doesn't carry much weight with me personally.

Krista Lane 32:03

Same.

AnnE Diemer 32:04

Totally agree. And I think most people with SHRM certifications would say the same right now. I thought about like doing a quick Google and saying like what should I say about SHRM on a podcast of what we don't like about SHRM. But realistically like one, everyone listening can Google that two, there is a Toot or Boot episode that talks about SHRM certifications.

Krista Lane 32:27

Yes.

AnnE Diemer 32:27

It's very good. So we'll link that in the show notes and if you want to hear more about SHRM and the chaos that they have brought in the last couple of years, but honestly for decades before that, highly recommend that episode.

Claire Baker 32:41

So yeah just to wrap things up I think that behind the curtain we found that HR certifications may not be the best signal of how good somebody is at this particular job um that it kind of targets the minimum, which is a very low bar, and that may not be the standard that you are looking for in your organization. And that people who don't have certifications may be very good at their jobs. And these are skills that you can learn in more than one way. And if you approach it with a sense of curiosity and a Chat GPT or Google account and a sense of discernment and you are comfortable in the gray areas, then many of these skills can be learned. They can be learned from other people who are further along in their journeys and they can even be self-taught if you are really paying attention to what's going on around you and listen to your conscience.

AnnE Diemer 33:54

That's a mic drop if I ever heard one

Claire Baker 33:58

is let your conscience be your guide

Krista Lane 34:02

That's it for today's episode of HR Peep Show with your hosts Claire Baker, Annie Diemer, and me, Krista Lane. Thank you for listening and stay tuned for future episodes covering both hot takes and practical advice to build sustainable, people driven companies. To view transcripts and full credits or find out more about us, go to HRPeepshow.com