Extract from Victoria Hudgins’s article “Pandemic Spurs Strong Demand for E-Discovery, Privacy Certifications. Will It Last?”
Some of New York City-based attorney Alesya Nasimova’s career goals for 2020 included becoming a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP-US). While she knew even back then that circumstances can change, she didn’t expect her life to look entirely different following the March 2020 U.S. lockdowns.
“I actually signed up for the class and I had the test date already set back in January before COVID started here, and I guess between work and home responsibilities I never got around to it. But with COVID, for all the people that said, ‘I don’t have the time’ we [suddenly] had all the time in the world. It helped me to buckle down and study for the exam,” she said.
To be sure, while COVID-19 took a lot of social events off of everyone’s calendars, many people’s days weren’t entirely filled with watching viral Zoom mishaps. In fact, some e-discovery and privacy certification providers saw a sharp uptick in registrations for their certification programs. And those organizations believe that their certifications’ professional relevancy will help them maintain the momentum from last year’s sudden upswing.
