Employee certifications

Overview

The concept here is very similar to company level certifications, just applied to your employees. So the concept here is to influence the government to require that key personnel to be staffed on a contract have certain degrees or certifications. The classic (and possibly true) example of this is convincing the government that the project manager for a contract should have both a Project Management Professional (PMP) cert, and a law degree. So the logic work like this:
1) Presumably the company that advocated for this happened to have an employee with both a PMP and a law degree.
2) That company made a case that due to the nature of the work in the contract the person managing the work should have a law degree
3) The government agreed and included that requirement
4) Very few other companies (maybe no other companies) could meet that requirement so the company that took the time to shape the requirements sailed to an easy win

Identify your differentiators/ strengths

  1. Identify the certifications that your people have: Create a list of the degrees and certifications that your people have
  2. Identify outliers: If your people have a bachelors degree that doesn’t really help much since lots of people have bachelors, but if they have masters, other advanced degrees, or unusual certifications put those in bold

Review the upcoming acquisition

  • Stage agnostic: Regardless of solicitation stage (Forecast, RFI, etc) you can and should think about how each of your certs intersect with:
    • What it will take to deliver the work
    • What it will take to manage the work

Why your differentiator/strength helps the government

Come up with a reason why the various degrees and certs your people have make if more likely that your company could successfully deliver the work

The work in the solicitation:Making the case that the government should require certain experiences, certs and degrees (that your people happen to have)
Requires close collaboration with government bureaucratsMaster of public administration (MPA): People with MPAs are trained on administrative issues
Senior government roles: People who have held senior government roles should know how to navigate bureaucracy
Operationally complexProject management professional (PMP): The PMP is a good framework for managing complex projects
Requires an understanding of complex regulationsLaw degree: People with law degrees are trained to read and interpret regulations
Legislative experience: Legislators craft regulations for a living
General counsel in the government: Government lawyers spend a lot of time analyzing regulations
Deep technical expertiseMasters/PHDs in that technical area: Having a relevant degree indicates experience and credibility in that space
Deep understanding of a government end userMilitary experience: Contracts for DOD equipment and support tend to be different because there aren’t many good civilian analogues, so staffing people with military experience makes them more likely to succeed
Touches on secure data or processesYour clearances: The government loves to over classify things, so if the work touches on something that is even modestly secure suggest that the government require the people working on the project have clearances.

Other resources

SAM.gov (Individual contract checks)

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List of further reading

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