Do I need an HR certification?

Risk assessment isn't supposed to be about reciting the letter of the law.

It isn’t a spelling bee.

The law is made for interpretation, not blind obedience. Knowing the rule isn't the same as knowing when it matters. But it's easier to test whether someone can memorize a bunch of regulations than if they can apply them in the real world. 

HR trivia champions aren't your best operators. You can memorize every rule and still miss the point. 

I have to bite my tongue whenever someone weighs in with the alphabet soup of credentials after their name. Too many just spout policy and call it insight. 

They treat “ruling” as a verb, not a noun. Like the person who fires off the most rules will be crowned "right." There’s a difference between knowing a rule and weaponizing it.

A “ruling” as a noun implies that you’ve considered all factors before making a decision. 

“Ruling” as a transitive verb should mean using a rule as a blunt instrument to beat people over the head with. 

The power given to HR already makes it too easy to throw your weight around.

Tell an employee “this is company policy” and they don’t argue. 

Tell a leader “this violates labor law” and they usually fold. 

It’s easy to confuse being obeyed with being right.

Certifications like SHRM and HRCI that over-rely on recall without nuance only magnify this false sense of authority. Like passing the exam makes you Solomon or something. 

I’m not certified, so maybe I’m missing something, but I’ve never needed a certification to read the law and understand what the words mean. 

It’s not like SHRM has some super-secret proprietary information or anything. The laws are public. They WANT people to read them. 

But if you take the regulations out of context as the databases do, you miss all of the precedents, exceptions, limitations, and objectives that give them nuance. If you rely on a dry article to do the interpretation for you, you miss the human stories that made the law necessary to begin with.

Laws aren't a shield or a sword. They're a responsibility. Certifications should make people feel more accountable for critical thinking, not less.

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