An excellent educator with the vision to make your purpose attainable: Career Certified

Career Certified dates back to 2005, when it was first founded as The CE Shop, which still provides education for real estate, mortgage, home inspection, and home appraisal professionals, as well as offering both printed and digital textbooks. The success of The CE Shop led to the creation of the parent brand, Career Certified, as the company expanded into multiple verticals. In creating Career Certified, the team leaned into their greatest strengths: their best-in-breed technology platform, incredible leadership, knowledgeable staff of industry professionals, and their passion to do the right thing for customers and the industries they serve. The very root of the company was started to create career freedom, create a purpose, and make a clear path to successful professions.

Career Certified makes your purpose attainable by elevating modern education while accelerating success for students in licensed professions. From exam prep to Pre-Licensing, Licensing, and Continuing Education coursework to tools for the entire lifecycle of a professional’s career, the company pairs an easy-to-use platform and flexible learning options with a deep understanding of students’ needs conducive to guiding them to career freedom. Career Certified serves a variety of industries which includes: real estate, mortgage, home inspection, home appraisal, architecture, and insurance and securities.

In conversation with Gary Weiss, CEO of Career Certified

Q. How do you monitor the performance of subordinates? What guidance and direction did you find most effective?

First, you have a plan, then you hire and align the right team to the plan, and then you execute the plan.  I believe in hiring the right talent for the plan and trusting the talent. I am not a micromanager but rather objective based performance management with goals that cascade down from the leadership team to the individual. 

Q. In your experience, what is the key to developing a good team? 

I developed my own Leadership Philosophy with the theme of Enable and Empower.  When I first started, I shared this with the team so they can adapt to the principles I believe will lead to a High Performance Team.  In fact, here they are:

• “Fail to plan, plan to fail”
• Hire great operators and let them operate
• Trust your talent, or get new talent
• Focus on creating 3-4 main things and stick to them, everything is secondary
• High Value Decisions require critical thinking, Low Value Decisions get pushed down
• Cycles = Productivity. Time Kills everything!
• “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good”
• “You may not know everything, but you know enough”
• Do what you say you are going to do
• Transparency, Communication, Honesty, and Hard Wor
• Be passionate
• Team first – we win together

Q. Do you offer individualized learning and differentiated instruction and what do these things look like?

Yes, we offer flexible online learning options and, in some instances, opportunities for in-person classroom or field training. Our differentiation lies in the quality of the coursework, most of it using modern, engaging content that includes video and animation.

Q. Specialized services come with an expensive price tag. How do you maintain your affordability and profitability?

Efficiency, consistency, industry relationships, and best-in-class leadership paired with and sophisticated, fine-tuned, sales and marketing programs. Our business unit marketers and sales team know their customers best and keeping a maniacal focus on their respective industries helps keep programs relevant and timely.

Q. How do you maintain a strong relationship with clients and how do feedbacks help you?

Just with The CE Shop alone, we get over 1M survey responses annually, and our team routinely scours the reviews to improve coursework and customer service in real time. Our sales team has close relationships with our B2B customers and industry associations through open, consistent, and transparent communication. Our B2C marketers are embedded in the industries they serve, and have equally longstanding relationships with associations and media partners. We’re always evaluating for improvement of people, process, and technology.

Q. How do you market your services?

We use an integrated mindset for both B2B and B2C marketing programs. We have a sophisticated marketing team tapping tactics in demand generation and lifecycle marketing, which includes display ads and email programs, event participation, partner programs, content syndication and sponsored programs, public relations, and partnerships with industry associations.

Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?

We are on the cusp of launching education for the Appraisal industry; as well as assessing continuing education opportunities for the architecture industry. But there is a lot more to come in 2023, so be on the lookout.

Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?

“Exciting” is an understatement.  We have quadrupled the company in 3 years and emerged as the leader in online career education.  We are always evaluating new verticals to grow into. From focusing on markets with large TAMs and continuing education requirements, to opportunities that could benefit from supplementation of our go-to-market expertise, as well as compliance and content, we are also maintaining strong organic growth and capturing additional market share. Expansion of our affiliate and channel relationships will be capturing revenue, but the product innovation is ongoing and entirely how we create stickiness for longevity and career lifecycle. The strategic planning we do for inorganic growth is a strength with our best-in-class assets and M&A playbook. The roadmap is packed full of innovation, with many releases.

Meet the leader behind the success of Career Certified

Gary Weiss heads Career Certified as CEO, bringing decades of experience in growing and transforming cutting-edge organizations. Just a few of his most notable professional accomplishments include ushering in double-digit growth as the Chief Operating Officer at Aspen Technology, leading the Cloud Transformation at OpenText, and leading CA Technologies to market leadership in the Security Industry as a Senior Vice President. Gary is passionate about philanthropy, sustainability, and sports and currently resides in Florida with his four children, five horses, and three dogs.

“With a core belief that by positively impacting the life of one person, an entire community can be improved, Career Certified is driven to guide individuals and businesses to success”

“The education is tailored to each profession we serve, providing our students with a strong foundation for success, ultimately delivering career freedom.”