INCOSE does not require formal or paid preparation activities as part of applying for or renewing INCOSE certification. However, free and low-cost learning opportunities are currently more plentiful in wealthy communities. The INCOSE Professional Development Portal (PDP) is one way to equalize the training opportunities for INCOSE members. The INCOSE Foundation also has an initiative in work to identify training and fill gaps, with a goal of providing SE training and education for the broader, global engineering community.

Training activities are largely beyond the scope of the INCOSE Certification Program. What does fit within the Certification Program is to recruit candidates from historically unrecognized communities. This is starting with encouraging students to apply for ASEP, women to apply for ESEP, and universities outside the US to apply for Academic Equivalency. INCOSE will be increasing marketing to these audiences and will be listening for the barriers they perceive to successful certification.

What did we miss? Please email certification@incose.net with your suggestions on how we can change our requirements or our assessment methods to cover more of the variations in systems engineers. Or, tell us where we shouldn't change things because the risk is too great that we'll falsely approve someone for certification. 

We are interested to know: do you perceive the current false positive (approved for Certification but wasn't qualified) or false negative (denied Certification but was qualified) rates to be high or low? How much further could they move before we'd have a credibility problem?