Because Certification Shows Competency

I took the Professional Human Resource (PHR) Certification exam last week and PASSED! This in itself is quite amazing because the test was very hard. Almost every question I was thinking "what...what are they asking me here, this makes no sense" and then I'd pick what I thought was the best answer. So you can imagine that by the time I finished the 225 questions I was almost certain of failure. I marked about 20 quesitons that I wanted to go back to but chose to leave most of those with my first answer (something I learned during my practice exams as everytime I'd change something it ended up being my first guess).

Friends and family have been asking me "now that your certified to you get a pay raise". The answer is 'no'. Now that I'm certified I get the satisfaction of knowing that I am competent in Human Resources (funny because the whole test I was pretty sure I was anything but competent) and if I want to can use the PHR letters behind my name.

So, 1 boot camp class (5 days, 8-hours a day with HR professionals and lawyers as teachers), 6 'text books', numerous parties and fun skipped to study, toting about 100 photocopied pages up a mountian in my backpack to study and 2 full days of practice tests and vocab quizes later...I can now call myself a human resoureces professional. Woot woot!