How does one become a LEGO® Certified Professional?

Question

The LEGO Group's official website has a page speaking about the "LEGO® Certified Professional" designation that a person can earn. It states:

LEGO® Certified Professionals is a community-based program made up of adult LEGO hobbyists who have turned their passion for building and creating with LEGO bricks into a full-time or part-time profession.

LEGO Certified Professionals are not LEGO employees, but they are officially recognized by the LEGO Group as trusted business partners.

Each LEGO Certified Professional is selected for the program based on his or her:

• Building proficiency
• Enthusiasm for the LEGO brick and building system
• Professional approach towards other LEGO fans and the broader public

What seems to be missing from this page is information on the exact process.

How does one become a LEGO® Certified Professional?

• Is there an exam that someone can formally request to sit at a LEGO Store or corporate headquarters?
• Is there a formal portfolio evaluation process?
• Is one required to amass a certain number of course credits in engineering, design, polymer chemistry, and/or education?
• Is the program invitation-only?

I did find an interesting article giving biographies of several LEGO® Certified Professionals, but it doesn't go into depth about how they specifically came to become certified. It mentions that "So if you are thinking about becoming a LEGO Certified Professional one day, it is a good idea to study their work and follow in their footsteps.", which isn't exactly helpful. If I want to become a physician, I need to be looking in to how to get admitted to medical school, not reading biographies of Galen and Jonas Salk.

I also found a testimonial of someone claiming to have earned the certification in 2010, and it consists of the author talking about how awesome the certification is and what they plan to do with it rather than explaining the process that they went through to earn it. This also makes me suspect that the requirements may be arcane or not well known.

Whether I, or anyone here, has or could ever achieve the level of skill required for the certification is not part of the question - the question is how one could try, even if the result is failure - rejected portfolios, failing exam scores, eternal banishment to Ice Planet 2002, etc.

Answer 1

First of all, there needs to be an opening for one, which typically means LEGO feels they need more Certified Professionals in a particular region.

The most-recent opening was last November and was presumably filled in December. For this most-recent one, LEGO had a posting on their website where people could apply, and they made a small announcement to fan communities via their ambassador program.

Assuming this is how future certified professionals get selected, basically becoming a certified professional means applying to an opening in the program, and getting accepted (I strongly suspect anything beyond the initial application is protected by an NDA).

Unfortunately, I don't know what specifically was asked from potential applicants to the most-recent opening, but if you are interested in perhaps applying you should be on the lookout for future openings. In the mean time, consider joining some RLUGs or RLOCs and making some connections, to gain a reputation as a builder and perhaps be recommended to apply when there is an opening.