SkillFront Is The Premier Skill Development and Official Credentialing Organization, Compliant With ISO/IEC 17024:2012 Standards For Certification Bodies.

SkillFront is a public-benefit certification body that provides education and certification services. SkillFront operates under industry-approved international standards and requirements, and maintains integrity and impartiality while taking into account professional and public interest. SkillFront provides objective evidence that a person or an organization operates at the highest level of ethical, legal, professional, and technical standards.

SkillFront certifies a wide range of professionals and organizations, including governmental entities, commercial businesses, and professional associations. SkillFront certification programs are based on recognized national and international compliance standards that ensure domestic and global acceptance.

International Credentials

SkillFront is the leading skill development and certification body for professionals and organizations compliant with the ISO/IEC international standards that form a unified system for evaluating and recognizing competent certification bodies worldwide. As a global skill development and certification body, SkillFront is committed to ensuring excellent service standards delivered by those we comply.

ISO/IEC is renowned for its rigorous compliance standards - influencing our approach to certify professionals and organizations, so we can serve you and your organization at our highest levels possible and positively influence your business results that would not happen otherwise.

These compliance standards have been ensured by adhering to a common set of acceptance criteria and continuous periodic onsite evaluations to determine ongoing compliance with ISO/IEC 17024:2012: General requirements for bodies operating certification of persons. Being "Compliant" means that a certification body has been internally evaluated, and its leadership team have witnessed the assessments of its certification programs, and they have been found to comply with international requirements. Every year SkillFront is internally audited to ensure our processes are entirely in accordance with these standards.

The SkillFront Certified Professional Certification programs' chief goal is to be market relevant, consensus-based, support innovation, and provide solutions to global challenges. That means thriving career chances for professionals, and meeting and exceeding demands from businesses and their valuable clients.

There Had To Be A Better Way. So We Built It.

New Year's Eve 2010.

As the rest of the world went about celebrating the dawn of a new year heading into 2011, I lay in my bed, next to my baby, who was born less than four short months ago.

My husband sat next to me, and I can still remember the sound of fireworks set off in the neighborhood.

I could see the colors of fireworks, reflecting off my husband's face. He turned and looked at me, while tears were pouring down my cheeks, and he said, "You didn't sign up for this. We're going to fix it!"

I lay down and put my hands back behind my head; closing my eyes, I felt every aspect of my being filled with rage.

My mind raced back to the winter, nearly twelve months before, to me getting promoted to a leadership position at one of Switzerland's largest local banks. As the manager of the busiest branch in the middle of the city of Zurich, I was leading thirty to forty employees, contractors, and agency staff. To this day, I can't help but marvel at the thousands of working hours, the millions of Swiss francs, and the enormously complex processes necessary to make a simple financial investment product shown in our portfolio of products.

And yet, there I was lying, heading into 2011, with the termination letter in my hand. It turned out that my employer didn't want to occupy their demanding positions with mothers of newborn babies. They couldn't wait any longer and quickly sent me my notification at the end of my twelve-weeks of officially deserved maternity leave.

At this moment, you may be wondering why I didn't go back to my corporate career, although I could have reasonably quickly find another job, given my qualifications and job experiences, even if I had this big "obstacle" of having a few months old baby.

What Made Me Decide To Help Professionals?

Let me tell you this. The shock of getting fired helped me admit three very important things that I haven't been entirely honest to myself before:

1. Large companies move slowly. Good ideas often died on the vine simply because they had to be approved by too many people.
2. Climbing the corporate ladder is an obstacle to doing great work. I wanted to focus on getting things done and making things better, not constantly positioning myself for promotion. Politics and turf wars are an inescapable part of the daily experience of working for a large company.
3. Frustration leads to burnout. I wanted to enjoy my daily work experience, but instead, I felt like I was running a gauntlet each day. It began to affect my health during my pregnancy, happiness, and relationships with my husband, friends, and family.

The longer I thought of these facts, the more I realized I wanted out. I desperately wanted to work on my own terms, as an entrepreneur.

The next ten years took me on a journey, trying to bring up my baby, become a good wife, and transform myself into the practical scientist to unlocking measurable results in every area of my life every day. A scientist I call the SkillFront Professional.

My name is Yeliz Obergfell.

• I am a married woman.
• I am a mother.
• I am a businesswoman.
• And most important:
• I am a SkillFront Professional.

I train professionals at all levels —from practitioners to owners of large enterprises— to develop skills, build professional careers, and dominate their markets online and offline.

I wasn't trying to become an expert.

In fact, I wasn't even sure what being an expert meant. I was, and I am still trying to be a student of my own passion; helping and serving other professionals succeed in business.

I wanted to set myself free after getting laid off. I had no clue that what would start with a decision to change my life would transform into a global movement thanks to the principles, frameworks, and support of SkillFront, the Skill Platform for Professionals.

Why Did I Build The SkillFront?

I started the idea of SkillFront in 2011 with zero knowledge of marketing, sales, persuasion, closing, e-commerce, or automated digital marketing systems.

On top of that, I had never delivered a service that was 100 percent created by me, and I had spent most of my career selling other services.

From 2011 to 2014, I struggled to get the message I felt in my heart and soul out to the world. Although we were having some mild success, I was paralyzed trying to figure out not only the psychology of being a female leader with my message, but also the science and technology to sustain and scale my business.

I have always been an avid learner, but before I decided to learn everything I could about how I can succeed as a professional, most of what I read was fiction. If there is one thing I am good at it, it is taking in a huge amount of information and distilling it into essentials. I am a synthesist by nature, and my travels through the business literature quickly became an exercise in separating the diamonds from the rough.

The more I learned, the more helpless I felt. For every great resource I found, I had to process ten other resources to figure out how to apply that resource in practice to excel on my own professional journey.

I started to wonder: how much of what's out there —and there is a lot out there— I really needed to know. How could I separate practical business and professional skills from the dry theory and technobabble? I only had so much time and energy, so I started searching for a filter: something that would direct me to the useful skills and keep me away from the chaff. The more I searched, the more I realized it didn't exist — so I decided to create the SkillFront.

As of this moment, 143,487 SkillFront Professionals are actively using the SkillFront Platform to quickly get their ideas, products, and services out to the world!

I don't share that with you to impress you. To some of you hearing this, that is a big thing, and to others, it's nothing. I share it to demonstrate what is possible when you learn, live, and leverage the practical science and art of being a professional while combining those skills with lessons you are going to earn in real practice.

So take a deep breath. It's time for you to unlock the blueprint of success as a professional and get to work.

Welcome to the SkillFront.

Yeliz Obergfell, SkillFront

Cofounder, Vice President – Professional Experience