Qualification

The Latin root qualis means "of what kind," and facere means "to make." Combined in Medieval Latin as qualificare, the word originally meant to attribute a specific quality or character to something. When the word entered English in the sixteenth century, it carried this descriptive sense: to qualify was to describe, to characterize, to specify the nature of a thing.

The legal and institutional sense emerged as professions formalized their entry requirements. The medieval universities had established systems of degrees and examinations, but the broader use of "qualification" as a required credential for employment expanded significantly in the nineteenth century. The professionalization movements in medicine, law, engineering, and accounting each created examination systems and licensing requirements that defined what a person needed to possess before practicing.

By the twentieth century, the word had become almost entirely associated with credentials and requirements. A job listing's "required qualifications" section defines the minimum education, experience, and certifications a candidate must present. The word's earlier sense of describing quality had been almost entirely displaced by the sense of meeting externally imposed standards.

The phenomenon of credential inflation, where jobs that previously required no formal education began requiring degrees, accelerated in the late twentieth century. A 2017 report by the Harvard Business School and Accenture found that employers were requiring bachelor's degrees for positions that had not traditionally required them, including supervisors and support specialists, a pattern the researchers called "degree inflation." The word qualification, which once meant simply saying what kind of thing something was, had become a filter that determined who could and could not participate.