Got an online course sitting in a basket somewhere, waiting for you to enter your payment details so it can “change everything” for you and your business? 

Or is it the Premier Elite Master Practitioner certification you've been eyeing up for months, with its information page perpetually open in a tab and slowing down your browser? 

Maybe the deal you've made with yourself goes something like: 

“Once I've done this one, I'll have everything I need to own my expertise once and for all and then people will take me seriously, and I’ll have all the clients and all the visibility and all the opportunities and… Oh, hang on… they’ve just released the waiting list sign-up thingy for the Premier Elite Master Practitioner Leadership certification…” *eagerly enters email for notification of doors open date*

There's always another one. It’s how these online course and certification models are designed to work. That’s how they getcha.

And every course you begin (because you never quite finish them, right?) feels like progress, and every certificate you do manage to get emailed feels like the last thing standing between you and being recognised for your brilliance. But we both know the certificate is a security blanket, and you've been using it to delay the moment when you find out what people really think of your work. I call it the credential loop. You're collecting certificates en masse, and mistaking them for proof.

Picture the person deciding whether to hire you. To begin with, they're checking one thing and one thing only: what you've achieved for other people, and whether you could do the same (or more) for them. The conversation goes like this:

Person with cheque book: Okay, you've got all the accreditations. Brilliant. Now talk to me about a time you went out into the field and used this expertise to get a knockout result.

You: Yep. Ummm. Of course. That’s a great question… or request? Could be interchangeable, right? You’re asking me for something, for sure, but it’s also kind of a statement. So weird. Anyway… a time I got a knockout result… hmmmnn…

If all you've got is theory, you’ll be leaving that conversation with nuthin’ but a “We’ll be in touch.” The course completion certificates and accreditation logos on your website might get your foot in the door. They won't get you hired in a specialist capacity.

Relying on this kind of validation also carries a risk.

A certificate is borrowed authority. Someone else or somewhere else vouched for you, so your standing depends on theirs. If the organisation that endorsed you makes a controversial call and falls from grace, you're stuck with it too, no matter how established it looked when you signed up. The results you get from applying your expertise belong solely to you and don't depend on anyone else behaving themselves. 

And if we’re being really real, plenty of these certifications come from governing bodies headquartered in somebody’s mum’s basement. Which makes them worth just slightly less than the paper they're printed on.

(Unless you work in medicine, law, finance, architecture or aerospace. You need those. Get as many high-fives as you can from the people making the rules. These are examples of industries where you gotta catch ‘em all.)

Courses for the joy of learning are great, by the way. Courses as a metaphorical duvet to hide under so you don’t need to get it crackin’ in the real world, aren't.

So you've got two routes to choose from, and both of them move you forward. You either (a) stop collecting and start using the certificates you've already got to get on with real work. Or (b) skip the certification chase thing entirely, go get your hands dirty and lead with what you can show and prove. 

Either way, it means taking what you know out into the world and getting real feedback on it. That feedback, whether it boosts your confidence or bursts your bubble, will be gold dust because it will give you fast instructions on what to do next to get to the top of the tree. You’ll also come back with case studies to point to, which is all the person doing the hiring wanted in the first place.

So, before you whip out your card to pay for another virtual learning thing, ask yourself what you'd be able to do with that certification that you can't do now. If the answer is “nothing a client would notice”, swerve it, and put the time you would have spent tearing your hair out over disorganised course modules into publishing a piece of thinking that captures the expertise you have now or putting yourself forward for something that finally encourages you to put what you know to good use.