Avoid These 3 Mistakes When You’re Putting Your Qualifications On Your Website

If you’re a highly trained specialist, you need to include your education, training, and experience somewhere on your website. But you can’t just drop them anywhere. Here are three big mistakes people make when they’re putting their qualifications on their websites:

They feature qualifications on their Home page

Your qualifications do not belong on your Home page. Your Home page is about drawing people in and giving them a taste of what it’s like to work with you or your firm, practice, agency, or organization. 

If you introduce yourself on your Home page by listing your degrees and awards, it can easily come across as arrogant, like you’re name-dropping before you’ve even said hello. The softer here’s-who-we-are-and-what-we’re-about approach is the way to go at first.

Your qualifications belong in your bio. Your bio can appear somewhere on your About page, or on your Teams or Providers page. If you really have a lot to say, just list the highlights in your bio and consider an alternate way to provide detailed information about your qualifications. (More on this below.)

Your bio is what people read when they want to learn more. It’s the perfect place to give people some proof that you’re able to do the work you claim you can do elsewhere on your site. In other words, when you put your qualifications in the right spot, you position your achievements to work with your message instead of fighting against it.

They write too much about their qualifications

Just because you know where to put your qualifications on your website doesn’t mean you should write down every single thing you’ve achieved in an endless narrative. 

When our eyes encounter a wall of text online (i.e. a really long paragraph), our tendency is to skip over it. Don’t write a step-by-step breakdown of your entire professional history.

If you have decades of accomplishments, highlight a few notable achievements in your bio and consider putting a link to a separate Qualifications page that contains your full CV or a bulleted list of your training and accomplishments. This way, the reader who is super interested in your background can get as much information as they’d like. This is a great way to keep the details contained so they don’t bog down the rest of your content. 

They ignore their qualifications altogether

A couple of months ago, I was looking for a particular type of medical specialist. I found a number of websites for providers in my area and landed on a site I really liked. It was clean and navigable, the photos were fresh and appealing, and they actually had a consistent message (rare on medical sites) that convinced me that they cared about issues that I, as a patient, may have faced in the past. Excellent! I was pretty much convinced.

But when I looked at the bio of the particular provider I would have scheduled with, there was not a word about their qualifications: no reference to the schools they attended or degrees they earned, no information about how long they had been practicing, not an inkling that they were licensed or otherwise vetted by or involved with their industry. It did have plenty of information about their volunteer activities and a nice description about their philosophy of care. But overall, it was a red flag. Because I couldn’t find this information, it made it look like this person was avoiding making their qualifications public—and this made me wonder if they were qualified or not. 

My guess is that this practice got incomplete advice about what to include on its website. I bet someone said, “Don’t brag about what you’ve done. Instead, focus on your potential patient’s desires and tell them how you’ll solve their problems.” 

This is great advice. But it’s not complete advice. If you’re in a profession that you’ve trained for over many years—one that required an internship or that requires you to maintain specific credentials in order to practice—you must have that information on your website somewhere. Otherwise, your potential patients, clients, or customers will do what I did and find someone else.