Sleep Health Manager Certificate

Currently, all domestic certificates labeled "Sleep Health Manager" do not belong to the national professional qualifications. There is no mandatory requirement of "certificate to be employed". There is no unified standard for its gold content. It is completely tied to the industry recognition of the issuing agency and the practicality of supporting training. It is neither a "magic tool for earning money" spread online, nor is it an "IQ tax for cutting leeks." Whether you want to take the exam and whether it is worth taking it all depends on what you use it for.

I just met a little girl born in 1998 who runs a community health center two weeks ago. She rushed over to me with a stack of colorful training flyers and said that the salesperson told her that she would spend 3980 to get this certificate, and she would be able to get a job without going to work and earn 20,000 yuan a year. I directly circled the four words "national certification" in the stack of flyers for her to tell her not to believe this evil. Nowadays, there are many certification agencies on the market, and the probability of getting them wrong is really high. Last year, on March 15, a group of institutions that engaged in professional qualification fraud were exposed. They guaranteed certification in 1980 and didn’t even need to take an exam. They would send you a certificate with a gold-stamped cover half a month after you paid the money, and it was printed with “Nationally Valid” and “Nationally Recognized.” It turned out that the certificate issuing agency was just a shell company that was just registered last year, and it didn’t even have a serious training instructor. Last month I helped a yoga studio owner screen resumes, and I met a candidate with this kind of certificate. I asked her who melatonin is suitable for. She didn't even know that pregnant women couldn't take it casually. This kind of certificate is just a piece of waste paper with words printed on it, and it is of no use at all.

But not all certificates are useless. I used to know a nurse who worked in the obstetrics department of a tertiary hospital. Last year, she took the sleep health manager certificate issued by the Chinese Sleep Research Association. The training was really rigorous. Half of the more than 40 hours of online classes were taught by clinicians from the sleep center. There were also 2 days of offline practical exercises, teaching how to read sleep monitoring reports and how to make cognitive adjustments to CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia) for users. During the practical exam, they also had to make sleep plans for simulated users on site. She now resigned and went to a high-end confinement center, which specializes in caring for mothers who have trouble sleeping after childbirth and are prone to mild depression. She charges 600 for a single sleep guidance, which is twice as much as her previous salary as a nurse. When the confinement center recruits people, they clearly require a training certificate issued by the industry's leading organization, which is much better than an ordinary health certificate.

In fact, the entire sleep industry has a divided attitude toward such certificates. When I attended an industry salon before, a sleep doctor from a tertiary hospital was particularly disgusted by this. He said that he had treated an old man before who had severe sleep apnea (OSA). He consulted a "certified sleep manager" who prescribed a large dose of melatonin and asked him to sleep on a high pillow. As a result, the old man fainted due to lack of oxygen in the middle of the night and had to be sent to the hospital for rescue. The doctor said that many training institutions now don't even teach the most basic identification of sleep disorders. They just issue certificates after just a few days of training. The people who come out are half-informed and are prone to bad things. But there are also people who provide community health services who feel that this thing is urgently needed. Think about it, there are now more than 300 million people in China with sleep problems, and the total number of regular sleep doctors is less than 10,000. How can they take care of it? Many people only have mild work and rest disorders, and there is no need to go to the hospital to register as an expert for hundreds of dollars. If there are standardized managers, they can help you screen out which conditions require medical treatment and which ones can be improved by adjusting your living habits. This actually fills the gap in the sinking market. Nowadays, many street nursing centers and youth growth centers are recruiting for sleep guidance positions, and having a formal training certificate is a hard threshold.

Seriously, if you are really thinking about taking this certificate, don’t just listen to the sales hype, check three things first to make sure you are right. The first thing to do is to look at the issuing agency. It is best to be issued by a formal industry association in the sleep field or a medical institution with a clinical background. Don’t look for a pheasant agency with a deceptive name that can’t even be found on its official website. The second review of the course outline is to see if there are core contents such as identification of common sleep disorders, interpretation of sleep monitoring data, and practical CBT-I. If it is all just "the importance of sleep", there will not even be a real case, so just pass it. The third question is to ask if there is any follow-up support for further study. Research in the sleep field is updated very quickly. For example, the sleep guide for teenagers just released this year has changed the recommended bedtime for junior high school students from 21 o'clock to 22 o'clock. If you get the certificate, no one will care about you. What you learn will be outdated in two years. The shelf life of the certificate is shorter than your milk.

To put it bluntly, this certificate is just a stepping stone. When I was a volunteer at a sleep center, I saw too many people who couldn't sleep well for three or four months in a row. They went to the doctor urgently and bought various sleep aids and took folk prescriptions. They spent tens of thousands of dollars and still couldn't sleep. If you are really willing to put your mind down to learn real things and can help people solve practical sleep problems, people will be willing to come to you if you have this certificate. If you just want to make money by relying on a certificate, then I advise you to give up this idea as soon as possible, because there is a high probability that you will be cut off by others.