What it means to be certified under ISO/IEC 17024

An exam, not a course

The most common confusion concerns the nature of the thing itself. A certification of persons under ISO/IEC 17024 is not a training pathway with a certificate at the end: it is an exam that establishes whether a person holds specific competences, regardless of how they acquired them.

IDCERT certifications work this way. There is no mandatory training pathway, and none is included. Candidates prepare however they prefer -- self-study, third-party courses, professional experience gained on the job -- and then sit the exam. IDCERT may recommend preparation routes, but does not impose them and does not require them as a condition of access.

The process is therefore linear: apply, sit the exam, get certified if you pass.

What the standard requires

ISO/IEC 17024 is the international standard for bodies certifying persons. Three requirements explain why it exists.

1. Impartiality, and separation between training and certifying.

A certification body must manage conflicts of interest and cannot make certification conditional on having attended its own training. This is the heart of the standard: whoever teaches and whoever judges cannot be the same party with the same commercial interest. Without that separation, the exam becomes the predictable conclusion of a course that was sold.

2. A defined scheme.

Every certification rests on a documented scheme setting out the competences assessed, eligibility requirements, examination methods, pass criteria and the rules for maintaining the credential over time. The scheme is not negotiable case by case: it is the same rule for every candidate.

3. A defensible assessment.

Examination methods must be valid -- actually measuring what they claim to measure -- reliable, and applied uniformly. That is what separates an exam from a questionnaire.

Why accreditation changes the value

A body can declare itself compliant with ISO/IEC 17024. Accreditation is the independent verification that it genuinely is: in Italy this is carried out by Accredia, the single national accreditation body, through periodic audits of the body and its schemes.

The difference for the certified person is concrete: an accredited credential is recognisable by third parties -- employers, public administrations, clients -- because its reliability does not rest on the word of whoever issued it.

The schemes currently active

IDCERT operates certification schemes on two European frameworks: DigComp, for citizens' digital competences, and DigCompEdu, for educators' digital competences.

Both frameworks are fully navigable on ExplorerHub, competence by competence. Knowing what an exam assesses, before applying, is the most effective way to judge whether this is the right moment to sit it.