CREDFORCE
Meet the World’s Largest Integrated Professional Credentials Provider
Pioneering Credentialing Processes and Platforms across Continents, Sectors, Verticals and Functions
With the world's largest range of services related to credentialing, capability validation and certification, CredForce is the strongest industrial impetus yet internationally for the growth of professional careers and companies.
It was adjudged a BRICS Top 100 most valuable company primarily for its pioneering initiatives in converting capability-validation into an organized global industry vertical.
Today, CredForce stands tall as a robust, globally networked and versatile organization that's ready to meet the most complex of credentialing needs of the widest possible spectrum of industrial, business and social verticals with its 50+ Certification products; 18 standards frameworks, and wealth of knowledge across industries and functions.
CredForce has created the world's first ever and the largest consortium of international certification bodies giving it the enviable capabilities of delivering business- and career-critical credentialing solutions to a host of sectors, industries, professions and functions.
These include verticals like Government, Social & Economic Development; Universities & Higher Education; K12 Education, Healthcare, Business Process Outsourcing; Software Engineering; Data Science & Predictive Analytics; Cloud Computing and Digital Marketing; as well as functions like Marketing & Sales, Talent Management, M&A, Investment Management, Private Equity and Business Strategy.
We met with Rajiv Gupta, President and Group CEO of CredForce, Fellow of The Wharton School and MBA from ISB, also an industry veteran in global talent management. You can read more about Rajiv's accomplished career at the end of this interview.
Rajiv: CredForce is unique – and honestly – quite without any parallel that I may know of. We're virtually building up credentialing into what may soon be revered as the mother of all verticals, because what we do impacts economies, their business, their companies, and the careers and lives of the citizens of these countries.
We're the only organization of our kind because we do not just facilitate certifications of international certification bodies. What makes us really special is the fact that we offer mature, complete solutions related to the entire list of credentialing needs that the firms and professionals may have today, thanks to competition.
We look at ourselves as an industry impact-force; a career-propeller. Just look at what we do, and you'll probably get a feel of how we influence business and careers in the 21st century world.
That fact that our credentialing ecosystem now extends across 178 countries gives us the power to deliver this impact, and we are happy to find worldwide leaders as our partners in our mission – companies like Pearson – whose footprint and expertise gives us such an immense reach among transnational corporations, governments, universities, multilateral aid bodies and institutions through this ecosystem.
It is because of these strengths and the support of our partners that we know we will achieve our mission of impacting the careers of 1 million+ individuals and the growth of 2,000+ companies worldwide by 2020.
Rajiv: The CredForce model is very interesting. For us, all our partners are clients, and more importantly, all our clients are partners. In fact, within our system, we've been successful in embedding this consciousness that the spirit of Partnership is the ideal way to approach relationships with clients, and I am amazed at how, companies and organizations we work with, have reciprocated this spirit.
So, the list that you ask of, is really big, because we do not only work for our own clients; we also serve clients of our partner credentialing bodies, and we treat even our partners as clients.
The few of them who I think have helped us change the face of credentialing by giving us an opportunity to work for them are multilateral aid bodies; global charity foundations; government agencies, ministries and special interest groups; universities; industry promotion boards; professional associations, and indeed, a host of small and large business corporations including Fortune companies around the world.
Rajiv: We're helping solve perhaps the most fundamental of business-growth and career-related problem – the Credibility piece. The cost of going wrong with new Hire or of doing business for a wrong company is unforgivably high now.
At the same time, the cost of assuring and vetting and validating your choices too, is very high. Then, there are frauds that don't exactly keep a ref-check or a due-diligence process entirely reliable.
CredForce solutions on credentialing and validating competence of professionals and management excellence of companies are the swiftest, most credible and reliable around – in addition to being affordable too.
The best part is that we cover professions and industries that have just emerged, or emerging – for which nobody else seems to have solutions based on rigorous international standards. We credential in numerous domains of information and digital technologies; management functions and new verticals.
Rajiv: We rely almost entirely on ethical advocacy and referrals to build our business. Our content teams are working overtime to support our global partners in their advocacy initiatives.
Our business model is an optimized variant of what is popularly known as the network model. Instead of two clusters of footprints that the conventional models have, the CredForce business model follows a model which unifies us across all the value-chain nodes, but also brings together all our vendors and clients on the one platform, increasing transparency and razing down barriers between partners and clients.
This, we do across 178 countries. Some of our other important marketing initiatives include seminars, conferences and events with industry experts and global thought leaders in several countries and international forums. CredForce also has a very strong Social Media presence and our proprietary websites also rank on top of searches.
Rajiv: Besides our acquisitions and partnerships with global leaders, I personally rate building our own global delivery platform as our finest achievement yet. In one go, our competencies have evolved to a high level, making it nearly impossible for any rival to easily think of breaching it.
Today, we have the capability of delivering the most complex of credentialing solutions across 170 countries, to the biggest ticket organizations that one may think of – fortune companies; governments; UN bodies; and multinational charity organizations.
The one other achievement – again nearly impossible to replicate easily by any other corporation – is the consortium of global credentialing and standards bodies that we are building. This gives us pan-industry reach, covering a humongous array of businesses, professions and verticals across the world.
Rajiv: The first of the things is expansion of our direct presence. We're doing two new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru, apart from our offices in Delhi/NCR, Austin, Cape Town, London, and Glasgow. Then, as I said, I'm most focused on building our digital infrastructure, so the work on adding more tools and modules carries on.
The third is expansion of our partnership and collaboration footprint. We're penetrating deeper into geographies where we were already present via Pearson. The fourth is knowledge, studyware and content – which we develop on behalf or certification bodies.
And finally, our capabilities to deliver B2C – 24×7, anywhere in the world. I am happy to share that soon, our online credentialing platform is likely to cover over 1 million professionals in over 7,000 locations by 2020.
Rajiv: CredForce is more than just a workplace. We are constantly striving to improve ourselves and our capabilities. Our stringent hiring process ensures that we select and on-board only the best out there, and then work towards developing that talent even further.
Simply put, it is a collection of the brightest minds, carefully handpicked and working earnestly towards building that next innovation- that is the idea. I am very proud of the combination of intellect and professional aptitude that every CredForce member brings to the team, right from the associates to the management.
Rajiv: Welcome Abhishek! I would like to say special thanks to The CEO Magazine for providing this wonderful opportunity to us. Thank you!
Rajiv is an industry-recognized influencer and is considered among the world's earliest innovators in Talent Management and enterprise-level talent issues faced by large and growing corporations.
Rajiv has been the youngest ever National Council member of Indian Society for Training and Development (1999-2000) and was awarded Best Organizational Psychologist of the year in 2000 by the Psycho Linguistic Association of India.
Rajiv was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year – 2014 by Thought Leaders International & CHRO Asia. He is also a member of the Bloomberg Market Advisory Board since 2008.
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