Safeguarding our skills from fake claims

I know a well-placed senior executive who was sent by his multi-national firm to attend a short two-week management course at Harvard in the US.

He is a brilliant young man and a great role model for aspiring Bahrainis. So imagine my surprise when I found that, upon returning, he updated his LinkedIn profile to show that he had “studied” in that Ivy League American University. Now, technically he had attended a certificate course there but to imply that he had attended this world-famous university for graduate studies is what we can call “faking it”.

In our present knowledge economy, evidence of skills and intellect is a powerful tool to flaunt in the jobs market. No wonder people are eager to acquire a fake qualification to cheat people and the so-called ‘degree mills’ are raking in the money since the anonymity of the Internet allows them to conceal many shortcomings.

One so-called distance learning university in an Asian country was recently exposed in the New York Times as having more call-center salespeople than faculty and also professors with ‘degrees’ issued by the same university’s associate colleges with slightly different names.

In the GCC, where people from all over the world join GCC nationals in the demanding task of building their nation, the entire process of recruitment is peppered with loopholes that allow employees with fake degrees to infiltrate and join the workforce. This not only dilutes the skills at hand but is dangerous. Imagine an engineer who probably did three out of five years of his study and then acquired a fake degree or a doctor with a similar academic history.

Would you trust your roads, your skyscrapers and your surgery to these people? This is why the recent crackdown in Bahrain against fake degrees is commendable. Just like the Kingdom has made a name for itself for the purity of its gold jewelry, thanks to strict rules about quality and scrupulous stamping of every item of jewelry, we must have the strictest watch on educational qualifications. Whether at the workplace when recruiting employees or guiding our youth on where to study and which qualifications are of true value, the Ministry of Education faces a challenge in stamping out fake degrees.

In an environment where companies run numerous checks on potential employees, including their social media personalities, verifying a university degree is easy. IT experts in Bahrain are even recommending that universities in Bahrain adopt the latest blockchain technology to embed their genuine degrees into the Internet where they can be verified.

This will greatly raise the value of Bahraini university degrees because, wherever the graduate from the Kingdom applies for a job, employers will find it easy to check if it is genuine and over time, every step taken to allow users (after all an employer is as much a user of a Bahraini degree certificate as the employee is) to verify it and offer a transparent checking system will enhance its value.

The other move that we should enforce is the strict and rigorous punishment of the person who uses fake degrees or provides one. By signaling zero tolerance of such dishonesty, we shall be increasing the value of Bahrain as a knowledge center and as a workplace that has the highest standards.