On certifying and learning

There is a sort of professional theatre that surrounds adult learning, in which the artefact — the certificate, the badge, the line on the resume — is mistaken for the thing the artefact was supposed to mark. The artefact gets defended, accumulated, listed in chronological order. The thing it was supposed to mark goes unexamined.

I have a five-state taxonomy for my own knowledge, and I keep it visible on this site. The states are dabbled, learning, working-in, teaching-from, and decayed. The most important of the five is the last one. Most professional sites pretend that knowledge, once acquired, remains. Mine does not. A skill I learned in 2018 and have not used since 2021 is decayed, and the Study Log says so.

This is the test I want to apply to my own credentials. Not "did I pass?" but "what stuck?" The two are not the same question.

The CAPM — the credential I earned in late 2025 — taught me a framework for thinking about scope, schedule, and cost trade-offs that has been quietly useful in client conversations ever since. That is what stuck. The PMI-specific terminology rarely matters outside formal PMI environments; I translate to plain English in practice. That is what did not.

I want every credential I list to carry that pair of paragraphs. Anything else is theatre.