Motivations for Pursuing Professional Certification

This study examines individuals' motivations to pursue professional certification. While certification offers a training alternative for individuals across a broad array of industries and continues to expand, scholarly investigations have focused primarily on organizational and individual benefits for certification programs. Since the outcome of certification programs includes the potential to improve performance at the individual level, it is also important to understand what initiates and directs a person to select this type of training option. Survey data were gathered from professionals (n = 1056) who were pursuing or who had completed a certification program offered by a professional association that represents organizations across a wide variety of service‐related businesses. Logistic regression and nominal regression were used, and the results offer a segmentation analysis of motivators revealing either growth/self‐development reasons or reactive self‐serving reasons for pursuing certification. In the service industry gaining knowledge was a motivator for employees as opposed to suppliers. Suppliers indicated they pursued certification to gain respect. Findings also suggest that the stage of career affects motivation; individuals early in their career were more likely to pursue certification for networking reasons. Understanding motivational factors will be of interest to professional associations and employers interested in stimulating employees' pursuit of learning via certification.