Helping You Manage Risk

Who you hire is the biggest decision you make. It’s also your biggest risk. 

Apart from some professional certifications and skilled trades, most skills you need for your business to succeed aren’t certified. Instead, you’re dependent on a patchwork of informal approaches to manage your risk.

The result is more questions than answers:

  • How do I know a job candidate has the skills they say they have? 

  • Does a job candidate’s work experience translate into evidence of skills? 

  • Does a job candidate’s education translate into evidence of skills? 

  • How do I know a job candidate is a team player? 

  • Are references really reliable? 

Trusted Skills professional certification aims to help your business manage this risk. It involves a rigorous process in which job candidates have their skills certified by a trusted professional.

Beyond the classroom

The idea behind Trusted Skills certification is simple. There are endless ways potential job candidates develop skills every day, through formal education, work experience, volunteering, advice from mentors, or self-directed professional development.

As an employer, you know that the most valuable skills don’t result from just one of these experiences — it’s about how they work together. Trusted Skills professional certification recognizes all job candidates took different paths, so its sole focus is certifying real skills, not how they were developed.

Decoupled certification separates how a skill is developed from how the skill is certified. An example of this is a driver’s license. Confirming an individual’s skill to drive a car is fully decoupled from how they developed the skill to drive. This decoupling unlocks capacity, driving both scale and rigour.

This decoupling model has been adopted by a range of professional fields and skilled trades. A critical factor of decoupling is anchoring the rigour, trust, and legitimacy of the body certifying the skills. As such, employers don’t have to evaluate the legitimacy of the numerous pathways or organizations that contribute to a candidate’s skill. Instead, they focus solely on the body’s legitimacy that certified their skill.