The Certified Park and Recreation Professional (CPRP) certification, an essential piece of a park and recreation professional’s career development, opens doors to career advancement, provides a sense of personal pride and accomplishment, and, overall, helps to raise the level of efficiency of the agency with which you are employed. While agency director in Davenport, Iowa, from 2008 to 2013, I provided staff with the opportunity to become certified, and at one point, 10 out of 40 full-time staff (25 percent) was CPRP certified. Providing this opportunity also unintentionally created a friendly competition among the staff to see who would become certified first.

In Louisville, Kentucky, where I’m currently the director, we are in the process of annually certifying at least 10 staff for the next three years. We are a large department with more than 300 full-time staff, and in the annual strategic planning process, the team members from various levels of the agency chose to make this a priority. It has definitely brought a sense of wanting to be certified and created a higher level of buy-in from staff in the quality of services and how we deliver them to the community. Our administrative goal is to be the agency in the United States with the most certified staff by 2018.

Having also served on the committee that wrote the initial Certified Park and Recreation Executive (CPRE) exam four years ago, it personally gives me great pleasure to see more and more professionals becoming certified. If cost is an issue, NRPA offers deep discounts for multiple test takers from an agency. NRPA places a high value on all the certification programs currently in place, and the CPRP is the jumping-off point to greater career advancement in the field. Learn more about the CPRP Certification.

Seve Ghose, CPRE/MOL, is the Director, Louisville Metro Parks and Recreation.