certificates – Katherine Reilly

By Katherine Reilly, Author, Teacher Trainer

Originally Published in ELT NEWS Magazine.

Yikes! Are we actually going there? In a market that is constantly changing, one would question the necessity of acquiring a certificate which would proudly adorn our wall, only to have it sidelined by most employers. Many a time, I would converse with students who have landed a job, only to tell me that they were never asked for their language certificate as a prerequisite to their hiring. “They just asked for my university degree and proof of previous experience,” is the answer I get out of most of them. Why then have we stressed the significance of acquiring proof of knowledge of a spoken language, only to have it disregarded by most?