Startup Idea Every Day #3: A Career Certification Company
This is the third post in my series, "Startup Idea Every Day", where I offer a new idea for a startup every day, for 31 days (January 2014).
A problem that a lot of companies have is that they don't really know if they're hiring qualified technical professionals, and a big problem that technical professionals have is that often times their application is stacked up against amateur hour. Doing the online tutorial does not count as professional qualification in Ruby on Rails, Node.js, or any other type of technical field. I think there should be a company, or organization, that offers certification exams for all types of technical professionals, much in the same way that SolidWorks has a certification program for it's users.
How would this make money? Well I don't believe in forcing people to spend money to make an honest living, so I think that the certification should be offered for free, and the companies that are hiring people in a certain field of certification can pay to contact them. Additionally the site could offer features to train an existing team of employees.
Hardest battle? Here I see three key challenges
- Getting an industry to agree on a standard for certifying people to do a job is going to be really tricky.
- Building the trust of the recruiters that would be using the exam as a benchmark for their employment process.
- Preventing people from cheating.
Would this make the world better? Yes. When it comes to starting a company, I think people should also focus on actually making a positive change, not just grubbing money. Creating a standard for certification would improve the quality of services performed, and would offer a more clear path to aspiring professionals.
As always, the startup ideas published in this series are completely free for use by anyone who wants to act on them, without any legal limitation.