BSC Certification

No. The topic has been exhaustively discussed in other fora, and in those discussions the only certification schemes to emerge appear to be simply training programmes that give you a certificate. I've worked with 'certified' Balanced Scorecard experts from two of the major programmes, and while it is great that they have had some training, in practice that's all they have had, and in both cases the training was based on pretty dated concepts / materials, so that also was not so helpful.

What matters is whether you understand what you are doing, why you are doing it, and have some relevant experience.

• The what and why are easy enough to cover, and you can learn this yourself on a 2GC Public Training course which uses much of the same material that we use for our internal training courses. You can also pick up relevant information from the various materials in the 2GC Performance Management Resource area (Cases, FAQs, Papers etc.)
• Experience is not something you can easily teach - you have to get this by doing. Within 2GC we work on the basis that it takes about 18 months of on-the-job working to get someone fully up to speed to do Balanced Scorecard design consultancy. This is not something you can cover on a course, nor does it appear to feature in 'certified' training from anyone right now (if it did it would be very expensive!)

The what, why and experience elements are also only part of the picture - to be effective in Balanced Scorecard design you need to be able to put this information / experience into context, and for this you need a good level of background understanding of how organisations and people within them work. Expertise on particular parts of business etc. is less important. Our normal educational pre-requisite for new consultants is a high level of general background education - typically an MBA from a good school. It doesn't seem that the current certification schemes have any such entry requirement.

In the light of this, I think you need to be very sceptical of the value of certification. All it really tells you right now is that the person is sufficiently interested in the topic to want to spend money to get a badge to demonstrate this - and presumably in at least one case, cough up an annual subscription to retain the right to use this badge. Being 'certified' might make 2GC more interested in talking to you than if not, because of this demonstration of interest. But being certified would not help you any further - we'd look at you from a more broadly based perspective, and probably discount in large measure what you had picked up while getting your certificate.

HTH