Any guy with a chainsaw can cut a tree. That’s not what you are paying for. You’re paying for a professional to have the education and training, and to carry insurance. That’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than a tree coming down the wrong way,” says Butch Bailey, a forestry specialist with the Mississippi State University Extension Service in the United States. This principle – validated training versus mere tool ownership – applies across all high-stakes professions, though the mechanisms differ significantly across domains.
In fields where errors can lead to catastrophic outcomes – healthcare, aviation, engineering, law – individuals can’t personally verify each professional’s competence. Society needs institutional validation as a collective necessity. Three validation layers work to codify trust in expertise: academic peer review, technological platforms, and regulatory oversight.
These layers exist in constant tension between protection and access. Protective gates can become restrictive barriers. The challenge isn’t resolving this tension – it’s adapting systems to maintain their protective roles while removing outdated restrictions.
The Knowledge Contribution Filter
Formal credentials confirm completed training, but many professions demand ongoing knowledge contributions. In evidence-based fields, academic peer review acts as quality control. Independent experts assess whether work meets disciplinary standards before it enters the professional evidence base.
Amelia Denniss, an Advanced Trainee physician with the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in New South Wales, shows how this process works. Research she co-authored on tuberculosis treatment at Kirakira Hospital in the Solomon Islands involved a two-year retrospective clinical audit. The study revealed that TB treatment consumed 15% of the Makira-Ulawa Province healthcare budget and identified diagnostic gaps.
The research underwent peer review before publication in Rural and Remote Health in May 2019. Publication acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal signals that independent reviewers found the methodology sound and the findings – including recommendations for implementing sputum analysis and GeneXpert testing – worthy of inclusion in the professional literature.
The independence matters here.
Reviewers can’t be swayed by institutional bias or personal relationships when deciding what enters the evidence base. This independent evaluation serves as a filter by requiring researchers to prove not just effort but methodological soundness, appropriate analysis, and meaningful contributions that advance disciplinary knowledge.
Academic publishing moves at glacial speed, but there’s method to the madness. Peer review distinguishes publishable from unpublishable work by assessing whether methods can support conclusions and whether findings warrant space in professional literature. Denniss’s work through peer review shows that professional validation requires demonstrated contributions to disciplinary knowledge, with publication acceptance serving as independent verification that work meets quality standards. However, while peer review validates individual research contributions, it can’t efficiently assess thousands of practitioners entering fields annually. That’s a challenge requiring different infrastructure.
The Standardisation Imperative
Healthcare systems credential thousands of nurses annually. Transportation sectors validate countless drivers. Technology fields require mass certification. Manual processes create bottlenecks and costs ranging from $200 to $1,200 per provider.
Standardised testing platforms address this scale problem by providing consistent evaluations using predetermined standards. Digital delivery enables geographic reach and volume capacity that manual processes simply can’t achieve.
Dr. Gary Gates, Managing Director of Pearson VUE since February, illustrates this approach. Under his leadership, Pearson VUE has delivered over 20 million Driving Theory Tests since 2004, demonstrating capacity for consistent mass assessment across geographically distributed test-takers. Twenty million assessments – manual evaluation would’ve required a small army of examiners working around the clock. His strategic priorities focus on innovation and standardised delivery methods that work to provide certification experiences balancing standardisation with accessibility.
Consistent standards across geographic and institutional boundaries prevent regional variation in competence thresholds, ensuring that a driving theory certification obtained in one location carries equivalent meaning elsewhere. Without such consistency, credentials would function as local signals rather than portable validation of capability.
Technological platforms like Pearson VUE serve as consistent gatekeepers across boundaries, transforming credentialing from localised manual processes to scalable systems that maintain uniform standards while increasing accessibility through efficiency. Yet these platforms can evaluate and validate competence but lack legal enforcement authority. Technology offers another innovation in the credentialing ecosystem – removing administrative friction within the process itself.
Accelerating Access Without Compromising Standards
Centralised credential verification systems exemplify how technological innovation can remove administrative gatekeeping barriers while maintaining validation rigour. These systems provide single-source tracking of licences, certifications, and credentials, functioning as coordination infrastructure for staffing compliance.
Recent healthcare implementations demonstrate concrete efficiency: nurses can be onboarded 40% faster than traditional manual credential review processes. This acceleration doesn’t compromise standards – nurses hold the same credentials validated by regulatory bodies. The change lies in eliminating redundant verification steps that delay qualified practitioners without enhancing safety.
Traditional manual processes often involve multiple institutions each independently verifying the same credentials. Each hospital separately confirms a nursing licence. Each department separately checks certifications. It’s bureaucratic theatre – all this redundant checking delays access without actually protecting anyone. Centralised systems eliminate the need for juggling spreadsheets and paperwork by providing real-time visibility into who’s cleared to work, allowing multiple institutions to reference a single verified record.
The underlying validation – actual licence verification by regulatory bodies – remains unchanged. What disappears is the redundant administrative layer.
Centralised verification systems show that technological gatekeeping can remove procedural delays without lowering standards, addressing accessibility concerns while preserving protective functions. However, technological platforms alone can’t legally prohibit practice, necessitating examination of regulatory bodies wielding legal enforcement power.
The Enforcement Layer
Unlike peer review or testing platforms, regulatory bodies hold statutory authority to grant and revoke professional licences. Physicians can’t practice medicine. Engineers can’t certify designs. Lawyers can’t represent clients without regulatory approval. This is the ultimate gatekeeping authority – legal power to prohibit practice.
When gates legally prohibit livelihoods, process fairness becomes crucial. Decisions must be transparent, timely, and evidence-based. Criteria must connect to genuine competence rather than arbitrary requirements. This requires regulatory frameworks that balance statutory enforcement power with procedural transparency and accountability.
Justin Untersteiner, CEO of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (Ahpra), shows how this works in practice. Ahpra holds legal authority over healthcare practitioner registration across Australia. They determine who may legally practice medicine, nursing, and allied health professions.
Untersteiner works on reform by appearing before the Senate Estimate Committee. He focuses on public safety and proactive harm prevention while calling for comprehensive review and transformation of the notification system. His work on accelerating accreditation reform and improving cultural safety for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people shows adaptation to serve diverse populations equitably.
Regulatory bodies face an impossible tension. They’re simultaneously protector and gatekeeper, guardian and barrier.
This dual role demands constant calibration between safety and access. Untersteiner’s approach shows the regulatory balancing act: maintaining public protection while ensuring procedural fairness and transparency is essential because legal authority demands accountability – a distinction separating regulatory enforcement from voluntary credentialing.
Regulatory Balancing Across Borders
How do gatekeepers decide what counts as competence? International regulatory frameworks highlight the need for gatekeepers to justify requirements through genuine competence assessment rather than defaulting to traditional barriers that might privilege domestic credentials.
British Columbia’s Superintendent of International Credential Recognition policy effective January 2025 allows regulatory authorities to apply for exemptions from prohibitions on requiring Canadian work experience. The decision framework considers whether Canadian work experience genuinely serves competence assessment or if alternative methods could evaluate competence without geographic requirements.
This exemption process forces regulatory bodies to articulate the competence-assessment rationale for work experience requirements – essentially requiring gatekeepers to prove their gates serve genuine protective functions rather than simply preferring domestic credentials by default. The superintendent’s consideration of relevance, alternative assessment methods, and impact on applicants versus public protection embeds transparency and justification requirements into regulatory gatekeeping.
Both British Columbia’s policy framework and Untersteiner’s reform efforts show regulatory gatekeepers evaluating their mechanisms – questioning whether existing processes serve protective mandates or have evolved into restrictions limiting access without corresponding safety improvements.
When Protection Becomes Restriction
Professional gatekeeping can create barriers that restrict qualified practitioners through opaque processes, excessive delays, or requirements disconnected from competence assessment. This demands distinction between necessary protection and arbitrary exclusion.
Professional associations can use gatekeeping authority to control not just competence validation but career access itself, determining which opportunities members may pursue regardless of qualification.
Leo McMahon’s criticism of the Professional Golfers’ Association (PGA) of America in the United States highlights this issue. The PGA uses internal algorithms and employment consultants to determine which roles members are ‘best suited for,’ often excluding experienced professionals from job openings they could perform competently. When algorithms start deciding careers, we’ve crossed from professional standards into algorithmic gatekeeping – and experienced professionals know the difference.
This illustrates the risk inherent in any gatekeeping system – the power to validate competence can expand into power to restrict careers. When experienced professionals are excluded by opaque algorithms rather than clear competence deficiencies, gatekeeping crosses from protection to restriction.
High credentialing costs create access restrictions unrelated to validation quality – the same credentials could be verified more cheaply. The core question remains: does a mechanism distinguish competence from incompetence or create barriers for other purposes?
Adaptive Gatekeeping
What makes gatekeeping work without becoming gatekeeping abuse? Effective professional gatekeeping requires continuous adaptation – incorporating technological efficiency, recognising diverse competence pathways, maintaining procedural transparency – to preserve protective standards while removing outdated barriers.
Both Denniss’s peer review experience and Gates’s standardised testing infrastructure share a crucial feature: independent evaluation by parties without vested interest in outcomes. This principle distinguishes protective gatekeeping from self-serving credentialism.
Denniss’s research required reviewers to assess work conducted in different healthcare contexts. British Columbia’s framework forces regulators to evaluate whether work experience requirements genuinely assess competence or privilege domestic credentials. Each validation layer’s gatekeeping mechanism embodies different forms of independent verification – peer review uses disciplinary expert judgement, standardised platforms use consistent predetermined criteria, regulatory bodies use legally defined standards.
These different mechanisms serve complementary functions that together create more robust competence validation than any single layer could provide. Peer review validates knowledge contributions but can’t assess thousands of practitioners. Standardised platforms achieve scale but lack legal enforcement authority. Regulatory bodies hold legal power but require procedural transparency. Together they address limitations each would face in isolation.
Each validation layer navigates protection-versus-access tension through different mechanisms – peer review balances standards with encouraging new voices, technological platforms balance standardisation with accessibility, regulatory bodies balance protection with procedural fairness.
The Permanent Calibration
Professional gatekeeping represents society’s imperfect but necessary attempt to codify trust in expertise. It’s a permanent tension that requires continuous negotiation rather than final resolution. Bailey’s chainsaw observation captures why this matters: societies can’t rely on individuals to personally verify capabilities when errors cost lives or property. Institutional validation becomes collective necessity.
As contexts change, gatekeeping systems must adapt mechanisms while preserving core functions. Denniss’s peer review experience validates knowledge contributions through independent assessment. Gates’s standardisation infrastructure provides consistent evaluation at scale. Untersteiner’s regulatory reforms balance legal authority with procedural fairness.
Each represents the same imperative: maintaining the protective function while removing arbitrary barriers.
The tension between protection and access never disappears. It just finds new forms as technology, society, and professions evolve. After all, nobody wants their surgeon to be ‘just some guy with a scalpel.’
