Quality is measured in many ways. In the context of teaching and learning, it is essential that the teaching materials and the examinations by relatively good, that the examiner be ostensibly impartial and that the questions be phrased in a clear and concise manner that makes sense and matches the course content. While important in all kinds of teaching, the question of whether or not the material is truly learned and truly useful is simply essential when assessing the interest of a professional 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 practice has caused Albert Einstein to say that “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school”. Professional certifications teach job skills; companies usually expect the employees they hire to retain these skills and use them to the benefit of the business they have joined. With respect to ECo-C training, two sayings sum up the situation: “the performance of the company really depends on the performance of its employees” and “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

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

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