Andrew Wolgemuth

I'm Andrew. Over a decade ago, I worked in a position that required me to pass a lot of simple e-learning courses for legal compliance purposes. To make an otherwise dull exercise more entertaining, I began collecting all the PDF “certificates" I earned from these, as though they were meaningful credentials. Then I added a few that I had from elsewhere to diversify the collection.

The joke got out of hand.

Once you start looking for them, the number of certificates one can earn online without paying a cent is quite astonishing.

I now hold hundreds of certifications, none of them intended as jokes, all of them presented sincerely by the issuing body, and not one of them of any real value.

My rules for adding to this collection have been simple: any certificate must have been made openly available by its issuing authority, each certificate must have had some requirement to be met before it could be granted, and I must have met that requirement by legitimate means.

Certifications with trivial requirements are not excluded; many of these certificates were earned for nothing more than attending a webinar. Some were given by e-learning courses that allow the user to attempt the final test before viewing the content. Many grant CPE hours towards credentials that I have never held.

My collection has grown to the point where I want to share it. Here's the basic chronological view of certifications from the most prolific sources. Smaller sources will be uploaded in future.