Certificates, their importance. What certificate and for what?
Guide for those choosing a certificate.
There’s many certificates available on the market and their providers are trying to convince Us that their certificate is the most important and that it will provide us with succesful life, work and business! But is it definitely true?
What certificate should we choose for Our business?
Remember! We pick a certificate based on the GOAL we want to achieve thanks to it!
There are two types of certificates available on the market:
Accredited certificates
Unaccredited certificates
Unaccredited certificate
Unaccredited certificate, also known as a common certificate is recognized when the laws or specifications require a management system certificate. That type of certificates is issued by consulting companies.
Remember: the requirement cannot refer to an accredited certificate!
That type of certificate is used to build a good company image (an office, a department, a hospital) and to recognize Our competences for organizations that don’t require an accredited certificate. Whether our certificate will be recognized by a customer depends only on their good will. The customers don’t have to recognize the certificate.
Advantages:
- It’s cheap and easy to get
- For some suppliers it does confirm the requirements of a certain level of knowledge or standard in terms of meeting norms (e.g. ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 26001, etc.) by the company.
Disadvantages:
- Officaly it is rarely recognized
Accredited certificate
An accredited certificate is recognized by all of the organizations in the world and it approves that our competences or actions are according to a certain norm or standard in a certain scope of our activity and in certain locations.
It is issued by accredited certifying bodies. The certificate has a logo of the certifying body and a logo of accreditation with the accreditation number. You can find the templates on the site http://www.pca.gov.pl/
Advantages:
- It MUST BE recognized by everyone
- It confirms that we have certain competences, eg. System Representative or Internal Auditor
- It confirms that we fulfill the requirements of a certain norm or standard, eg. ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO 26001, etc.
Disadvantages:
- We need to fulfill certain requirements to get it
- It is more expensive
Who accredits certification bodies:
The list of bodies accrediting certification bodies can be found on the website https://iaf.nu/en/recognised-abs/.
IAF is a unit supervising the accreditation bodies (a police officer supervising a police officer).
Every accreditation body has a list of certifying bodies accredited by them on their website, for example the Polish Accreditation Center (PCA) https://www.pca.gov.pl/akredytowane-podmioty/.
Remember!
If a certifying body was accredited by an accreditation body associated in IAF, it automatically got recognized by the other accreditation bodies and their mother countries (PCA – Poland)!