Apply HN: Skill Certification You Can Trust
This is a really interesting idea. I&#x27;m not convinced from your description that you have a viable product just yet, but I think you&#x27;re headed down a really good path.  Here are some more thoughts:<p>- Testing and certification is the most economically valuable aspect of education (at the high end the most valuable test a student can take is getting accepted to an elite institution (I&#x27;m using &quot;test&quot; broadly here)).<p>- Learning itself can and has scaled quite easily thanks to the internet. But testing and certification hasn&#x27;t really yet.<p>- There is a huge opportunity to build a new authority for testing&#x2F;certification&#x2F;credentialing. (In many ways YC is doing this almost by accident, but it&#x27;s not their main focus and they&#x27;re not doing it in a scalable way).<p>- The kind of knowledge and skills that are valuable in white collar &quot;knowledge worker&quot; jobs are typically not what you study for and get tested on in school. It&#x27;s more the various soft skills that let you succeed. In other words, it&#x27;s not the algorithms themselves, it&#x27;s that you&#x27;re disciplined and smart enough to figure out how to learn them.  The same is true for white boarding interviews - and lots of management roles too - it&#x27;s not just that you know how to balance a binary tree, it&#x27;s that you can explain how to do so in a clear way, can handle curve balls without getting flustered, and seem like a good person to work with.<p>- There are lots of professional certifications that various professions require. But it&#x27;s not necessarily in anyone&#x27;s interest for workers to take these kinds of tests more often or in a more rigorous way.<p>- There probably are some industries where concrete knowledge testing is valuable. I don&#x27;t know how big a market it is, but it&#x27;s probably there. One strategy would be to go after these industries. I&#x27;d look for fields with high turnover, and&#x2F;or where companies are losing money due to worker error.<p>- Another strategy would be to go after the higher end, and try to become a trusted authority for certifying employee skills. I think this is better because this seems like the kind of thing where it&#x27;s easier to go from high-end to low-end than the other way around.<p>- Certifying knowledge workers would probably look less like giving them pop quizzes and more like conversations with them, of else just tracking their work closely and assessing it.<p>- To get it off the ground you need to decide who is your customer - the worker or the employer? It sounds like you&#x27;re thinking workers will be your customer. In that case the most important thing will be to show a return on investment for a few early adopters. I&#x27;m not sure how best to do that early on, but I think you&#x27;d want to have some clear benefit that they get - i.e. getting a job or a promotion indirectly as a result, but that probably way beyond your control. Maybe there&#x27;s something else?