Quality ismeasured in many ways. In the context of teaching and learning, it is essentialthat the teaching materials and the examinations by relatively good, that the examinerbe ostensibly impartial and that the questions be phrased in a clear andconcise manner that makes sense and matches the course content. While importantin all kinds of teaching, the question of whether or not the material is trulylearned and truly useful is simply essential when assessing the interest of aprofessional certification such as the ECo-C.

 Everyone knows about the concept of „cramming“,or of learning things just to pass a test. In fact, this particular practicehas caused Albert Einstein to say that “Educationis what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”. Professionalcertifications teach job skills; companies usually expect the employees theyhire to retain these skills and use them to the benefit of the business theyhave joined. With respect to ECo-C training, two sayings sum up the situation: “theperformance of the company really depends on the performance of its employees”and “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Indeed, in abusiness context the “whole” refers to the sum of a company’s employees who,working together, achieve more than they individually would. And indeed, arecent survey of about 1,500 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Austria foundthat overall, training employees in the areas of the ECo-C (active listening,how to ask questions, how to eradicate misunderstandings) improves theirperformance by one hour on a weekly basis. Adjusted to the entire country andsalary scale, this means that if all the employees of small businesses were tobe properly trained, Austrian SMEs would make 153.6 million Euros per year morethan they currently are.

In practice,this implies many things at once: that the lessons taught by the ECo-C areuseful, and that a country could gain much by encouraging their adoption on avery broad scale.