Professional certification strengthens ties to credit community

The journey towards earning a designation through one of NACM and FCIB’s Professional Certification Programs brings both challenges and moments of immense pride. While the course load may seem heavy at first, finding the connections between what is learned in the classroom and what skills are applied in your day-to-day work can bring about a newfound confidence. 

For Shahroz Malik, CICP, credit analyst for 1-800-Got-Junk? Commercial Services (Vancouver, BC), earning his Certified International Credit Professional (CICP) designation was an opportunity to deepen his understanding of the international credit landscape.  

“As I work a 9-5, the challenges were trying to organize my afterwork schedule to fit in adequate time for learning and retaining information from the course, as well as keeping pace with the course materials as my workload kept on increasing,” Malik said. “A big success in this journey was being able to start to apply knowledge learned from the course directly to my daily work as the weeks went by and also having the sense of accomplishment as I could identify how applicable the information learned was to my career and current job.” 

Professional certification programs are not only an opportunity to deepen your understanding of credit, but a chance to strengthen your ties to your peers in the business credit community.  

“My favorite part of the experience was definitely engaging with other students and learning about their point of views and how they apply credit,” Malik said. “My most memorable experience was definitely clicking submit on the final exam and seeing my passing grade which meant all my hard work had paid off.” 

📝Study tip: Even when working on strict deadlines, be sure to build in time to unwind. “Always setting time-based deadlines and sticking to it but also ensuring you are recharging with rest and hobbies to disengage and come back fresher,” Malik said. “For me, it’s setting aside two hours after work to relax, go to the gym and play video games as a way to disconnect and refresh. After those two hours I would assign myself a certain amount of course load to go through and learn.”