The disparity between what a person earns their college degree in and what they end up spending their lives doing for a living is often very different. And if you give anyone credit for cutting or eliminating the difference and making more career options available to those who want them, it’s the colleges and universities across the country that make professional certificates available.
Certificates Anyone?
Professional certificates serve a number of excellent purposes. They can, for example, give a person a glimpse into a new career or interest, but one of the most important is to “tweek” one background to fit another, or to lend credibility of a certificate subject to another type of education.
All of this is important for another reason: although you can earn the credibility of a certificate to a degree in another, it can all be accomplished normally in a time period that is far less than it would take to earn another bachelor’s degree or a master’s degree.
Many people who have been out uf the educational system for a while use certificate programs to put a toe in the water in order get used to following a more full-scale academic program.
A Whole New Adventure
Another popular use for a earning a certificate in a program is to serve as an entree into a new field. If, for example, you have a degree in marketing, what harm could it do to earn an addition certificate in business? The answer is obvious: earning a certificate in business would give a student a different, more general view of business that would allow him to better understand the role marketing plays in the grand scheme of things.
Earning a professional certificate lends credence to a job candidate’s claim that he could do a job that might focus on the generalized approach to marketing from the perspective of the overall business organization. By contrast, with only a marketing degree, an interviewer could infer that the candidate has too much specialized knowledge without the perspective of the generalized business approach.
Out of the Cave, Into the World
One would have to be a cave dweller not to understand that besides a specialized knowledge of a business’s functions, decision makers look most often for those who understand the “big picture” of a business enterprise, thus the need for a more generalized understanding of how business works. In today’s busy and competitive world, this objective can be gained by earning either a general business professional certificate or appropriate professional certificates, depending mainly on what is available at local colleges and universities.
It should also come as no surprise to learn that with a marketing background there should be little question that a job candidate would be able to perform the functions of such a role. Despite this, however, there might be little change that this person would be able to advance into the management of a company without the background afforded by a general business certificate or other similar credentials.
It’s a good thing that so many institutions have had the foresight to offer these programs since they have provided such great opportunities to those who have earned them.