Can you believe it? Today, can you believe there are less than 700 GPCs (Grant Professionals Certified)!
The GPC Story in a nutshell: It all started with a conversation in 1999. Over the next seven years, what we now know as The GPC Competencies were hashed out by three independent expert agencies. Until finally — in 2007 — 100 grant pros took the first painstakingly developed GPC exam with paper and pencil.
Hundreds more followed. The exam and recertification process went remote in 2012. By 2016, there were 100 Grant Professionals Certified.
Then, in 2019, the GPC became the first professional credential for individuals working in the grants field to be recognized by a national credentialing body: the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. To date, it is still the ONLY credential recognized for grants.
The Grant Professionals Certification Institute oversees and polices GPC eligibility, scoring, maintenance, and Accepted Education Training, and this past week revealed its latest cohort of GPCs. My LinkedIn feed was abuzz with announcements and congratulations all week long.
There are several reasons why this is a big deal. The GPC is nothing to sneeze at. Their credential was attained after years of work in the field, honing their craft, and devoting themselves to nonprofit service.
How so? Well…
Points toward eligibility to apply to take the exam are earned in four categories:
- Education (college degree but a high school/associate degree “pathway” is also available);
- Professional Experience (3-7 years, depending on your pathway);
- Continuing Education/Professional Practice (40-50 hours within the past two years); and,
- Community Involvement (20-50 hours within the past three years).
Also required are:
- three signed and dated letters verifying your grants experience;
- a list of successful proposals; and,
- your exam fee, which runs several hundred dollars.
And that’s just to get accepted TO TAKE THE EXAM.
Then you have to get ready for the exam. There are guides, study groups, GPC Fireside Chats, and other resources to help you prepare.
But nothing prepares you for the grueling, 4-hour multiple-choice section with 150 questions, and the 90-minute essay section. And no one else’s exam is like yours — all the exam questions administered are different, shuffled, and re-shuffled.
And even the test questions are tested! All in the name of fairness, validity, reliability, and alignment with psychometric standards.
Which leads me to my point. The GPC is, yes, a Certification. But it is so much more than that.
The Oxford dictionary defines certification as “the action or process of providing someone or something with an official document attesting to a status or level of achievement.”
That’s a pretty broad definition.
And what happens is, everyone and anyone can offer a “certificate” and everyone and anyone can call it “certification.” As when a Certificate of Completion is awarded simply for getting through a closed-ended course, but the recipient misrepresents it as saying they are then “certified.”
In the last few months, I have had two individuals new to the grants profession say to me that they had completed “so-and-so’s” course, and they now were certified grant writers! I mentioned this conundrum in the GPC Ambassador meeting last week, and found that most everyone else on the call had run into the same misrepresentations.
As you can imagine, as GPC Ambassadors, we were completely put off seeing the credential we worked so hard to earn being diminished.
So we asked ourselves: Do we admonish the misguided certificate holders? Do we track down the providers of those certificates and demand a retraction?
Or do we look inside, and examine what sets ourselves apart, and define ourselves better?
So I am on a crusade. Let’s rename the “Grant Professional Certified,” and instead call ourselves “Credentialed Grant Professionals.” It’s a subtle shift, but it speaks volumes. It sets us apart from the certificate-holders.
The GPC name may have been appropriate before 2019, but since then the GPC has become a professional credential recognized by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies. So let’s say so up front! An accredited credential. Not to be confused with a certificate.
A university is accredited by a national (and sometimes international) accrediting body. A degree from that university is backed by that accreditation. Should the GPC not hold itself to the same standard?
The GPCI worked hard to get that accreditation; let’s tout it!
