Let’s face it — we live in a world obsessed by certificates. All the important life stages — birth, graduation, marriage, home ownership, death — are all marked with solemn and official looking piece of paper.

The role of certificates is certainly prominent in our professional lives too. Apply for a software development position and your potential employer will usually ask for physical proof of your diploma, degree, or certification. In many instances, that official piece of paper or digital certificate really counts.

At InnerWorkings, we introduced our certificates of achievement for .NET developers about 2 years ago. I recall that we questioned the effect of certificates on our developer audience at the time.

Would people appreciate the validation and visible recognition of a job well done, or would it simply be an annoyance without much objective value?

Thankfully, the response from our developer community to receiving our certificates of achievement has been overwhelmingly positive.

The premise behind our certificate model is simple — for every Drill (3 hours of .NET coding exercises) that you complete successfully, you receive a digital certificate from our learning platform.

Our certificate threshold is very high, I might add — you’re required to post a perfect 100% score in each coding task before the system will recognize your achievement. It’s not that we are biased towards perfectionists, I protest; we simply take the view that an application which is 97% secure isn’t going to cut it with your customers in the real world.

Since introducing the certificate system into our developer community, our platform has issued almost 20,000 unique certificates of achievement to individual developers. Think of all the rain forests we’ve saved by opting for digital certificates, eh?

Feedback on our certificate feature has been really positive too — it’s clear that developers in our learning environment are delighted to receive recognition of their hard work in getting to grips with new and often difficult .NET technologies.

Peer recognition is always a nice bonus, so many developers choose to share their hard earned certificates on social networks or add them to their resumes. Go on, we encourage you to brag a little!

In the end, I think it’s human nature to want a physical record of our achievements and recognition of our skills — imagine the Olympic Games without medal ceremonies, or the World Cup without that stunning gold trophy.

So if you’re in the business of building a community of practice where people contribute significant time and effort, I’d highly recommend that you consider a certificate system to reward your users. It’s likely to generate good feeling among your most dedicated followers and I promise it’s much less painful than a trip to the local government office to retrieve your birth certificate!

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