Our certification value
Why your Lean Six Sigma certification from The Lean Six Sigma Company matters
A Lean Six Sigma certificate from The Lean Six Sigma Company is a promise: you can do the work, not just describe it. The promise is certified at two levels: the course content against ISO 18404 and ISO 13053 by Kiwa, and the organisation itself to ISO 9001 by BSI and ISO 21001 by Kiwa. Its four pillars: programme quality, knowledge transfer, brand recognition and result focus.
The promise behind the paper
What does a Lean Six Sigma certificate actually promise?
A certificate is more than a piece of paper. In essence, it is a promise. Every certificate is a promise from the certifying party that the holder possesses a certain set of knowledge, skills and attitudes. That promise is not made only to the certificate holder, but also to the employers, organisations, colleagues and stakeholders who rely on the certificate as evidence of competence.
It can be difficult, however, to establish what a certificate is truly worth, because anyone can issue one. The real value of a certificate therefore lies in how its promise is substantiated: in the credibility of the party issuing it, and in what that party has itself been independently certified for. That question matters most when you are not in the room, and a hiring manager, a client or a tender panel is deciding what your certificate tells them about you. At The Lean Six Sigma Company, we take that responsibility seriously. The strength of our promise rests on the four pillars set out below.
One promise, certified twice
Certified for how we operate
Quality management and educational organisation management, independently certified.
Certified for what we teach
Course content certified against the international standards for Lean Six Sigma.
Pillar 1: Programme Quality
How does programme quality protect the value of your certificate?
The programme behind your certificate is itself certified. The Lean Six Sigma Company’s course content is certified against ISO 18404 and ISO 13053 by Kiwa · the international standards for Lean Six Sigma competencies and for the methodology itself. What you learn therefore matches internationally defined expectations for your role, wherever in the world you complete your training.
A certification can only be trusted if the learning journey behind it is structured, repeatable and aligned with clearly defined professional expectations. This is precisely what content certification establishes: an independent certification body has verified that what we teach matches the international standard for the field. It is a claim about the programme rather than the participant. One distinction deserves to be stated plainly here.
Consistency plays an equally important role. Our programmes are built around structured learning paths, defined learning outcomes, practical application and standardised expectations for both participants and trainers. This helps ensure that the meaning of your certification remains clear and transferable across organisations, industries and countries, and that it continues to represent a reliable benchmark of professional capability long after your training ends.
EXPLORE PROGRAMME QUALITY
How The Lean Six Sigma Company safeguards this is set out in the Quality Statement
Pillar 2: Knowledge Transfer
Will you actually be able to
apply what you learn?
At The Lean Six Sigma Company, you are taught, examined and coached, not examined alone. Our programmes combine classroom and virtual training, simulations, case studies, exercises, personal coaching, peer interaction and self-study, so that Lean Six Sigma becomes capability you can apply in your own organisation, not theory you can merely recite.
A well-designed programme only creates value if participants are genuinely able to develop and retain the required competencies. The effectiveness of certification therefore depends not only on what is taught, but on how effectively knowledge and practical capability are transferred. For that reason, we place strong emphasis on educational quality and practical learning environments: you engage with the methodology from several angles, conceptually in the classroom, analytically in case work, and practically under the guidance of a coach, and you apply it for real before your certification is complete.
Throughout your programme, you are guided by our trainers, who combine years of operational and project experience with training expertise. Around the training itself sit online learning platforms, digital resources and supporting literature, so help is at hand between sessions and after your course has finished. Together, these elements create an environment designed not simply to transfer information, but to develop lasting capability.
None of this rests on good intentions alone, and at scale it cannot. A certificate is a promise made thousands of times over, across years and across countries, and each one has to mean the same thing, or none of them can be trusted to mean anything. Keeping a promise that often is a process problem, and we solve it the way we teach our participants to solve theirs: our educational organisation management is certified to ISO 21001 by Kiwa, and our quality management system to ISO 9001 by BSI. It would be strange to trust a continuous improvement company that did not manage its own quality this way.
For you, this shows up in specifics. Learning outcomes are defined before a course begins, and what participants tell us feeds back into how the next one is run, so the programme you join has been improved by everyone who came before you. The processes around your training, from enrolment through examination to the issue of your certificate, run under the same audited system, so a result earned with us means the same wherever and whenever it was earned. Standards alone do not create good teaching, but they make good teaching repeatable, and they make weak points visible so they can be put right.
Pillar 3: Brand Recognition
Who recognises a certificate from The Lean
Six Sigma Company?
Seven universities and business schools across Europe co-develop and host Lean Six Sigma programmes with The Lean Six Sigma Company. The University of Bedfordshire has partnered with us since 2013 for open-enrolment courses; RSM Erasmus University co-delivers the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Excellence Programme; and Mannheim Business School co-created the Black Belt Data Engineer course.
United Kingdom
Since 2013 we deliver open enrolment Lean Six Sigma courses for professionals and executives together with the University of Bedfordshire, hosted at the historic Putteridge Bury campus.
RSM Erasmus University
With Rotterdam School of Management we present the Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Excellence Programme. Advanced Black Belt training meets a leadership component crafted by RSM, so graduates lead improvement as well as they analyse it.
Mannheim Business School
Together with Mannheim Business School we created the Black Belt Data Engineer course. We bring Black Belt level Lean Six Sigma expertise, the school adds its focus on process mining, and participants gain a skill set built for the future of data engineering.
These are not endorsements on paper but joint programmes: five have been co-created with partner institutions that examined our curriculum and chose to build courses on it, with their own names attached. A top-tier US university likewise offers our Yellow, Green and Black Belt training to its own staff through the university’s Lean Six Sigma staff programme. Collaboration is an integral part of how we work: we co-develop courses, exchange research and keep our curriculum aligned with current developments in continuous improvement. It is one of the ways we prove our merit rather than assert it.
Since our founding in Rotterdam in 2002, we have focused exclusively on Lean Six Sigma, and we have trained over 50,000 professionals worldwide. For you, this recognition travels with your certificate. An employer in another country or industry encounters the same organisation, the same standards and the same programme
behind your qualification, and it is our ambition to keep it that way.
Beyond these academic and regional partnerships, we also hold a number of country-specific recognitions and registrations, set out in full on our Regional Certifications page.
EXPLORE RECOGNITION
Pillar 4: Result Focus
What results stand behind your certificate?
Real improvement projects. For most certification levels at The Lean Six Sigma Company, successfully completing a real improvement project, with measurable results in a real organisation, forms the core of the certification process. Your certificate therefore documents applied capability: evidence that you have improved an actual process, not only passed an exam.
You are supported through the project rather than left to deliver it alone: classroom teaching, personal coaching, project reviews, tollgates and feedback from Master Black Belts.
This creates value on multiple levels. For you, the project demonstrates the ability to apply Lean Six Sigma in practice. For your organisation, it provides direct evidence that the methodology can generate measurable operational and financial improvements. And for employers and future stakeholders, it serves as proof that you have operated within real improvement environments rather than purely theoretical or simulated settings. Professionals from organisations including ASML, AstraZeneca and Coca-Cola Hellenic have trained with us. In the United Kingdom, they include Amazon, the Ministry of Defence and QBE.
Your certificate also connects directly to a proven deployment approach: the Total Improvement Framework, our method for embedding continuous improvement across an organisation.
EXPLORE RESULTS
A closer look
Why do independent standards make a certificate more trustworthy?
Because ISO does not sell training and does not commercially own certifications. ISO standards are developed by experts, organisations and national standards bodies working by international consensus, independently of any single provider. A certificate built on ISO 18404 and ISO 13053 therefore represents competencies defined by that consensus, not by the commercial interests of one organisation.
This differs from proprietary certification schemes, in which the same commercial entity may simultaneously own, govern, market and monetise the certification framework itself. That separation of roles is what makes a certificate transferable: it represents competencies that belong to the field, not to any one provider. Independent standards do not replace good teaching; they make it possible to recognise good teaching wherever it happens.
Other bodies of knowledge for Lean Six Sigma exist, including those maintained by BSI, IASSC and ASQ, each with its own approach and its own following. The certification you earn with The Lean Six Sigma Company is built on the ISO standards for the field.
Frequently asked questions
Questions about certification value
1. Does an ISO 18404-certified course mean I am ISO 18404 certified?
No, and the distinction is worth understanding. Certification of course content and certification of an individual are two different things. When The Lean Six Sigma Company states that its course content is certified against ISO 18404 and ISO 13053, that is a promise about the programme: an independent certification body (Kiwa) has verified that what is taught matches the standard. Your personal certificate is issued by us on the basis of that certified programme; it does not make you an ISO 18404-certified person.
2. Is a Lean Six Sigma certification worth it?
A Lean Six Sigma certification is worth holding when the promise behind it is substantiated. A certificate from The Lean Six Sigma Company documents that you completed a programme whose content is certified against the international standards for the field, that you were taught and coached rather than only examined, and, for most levels, that you delivered a real improvement project with measurable results.
3. Why get certified with The Lean Six Sigma Company rather than another provider?
Two reasons that can be checked rather than taken on trust: our course content is certified against ISO 18404 and ISO 13053 by Kiwa, and certification at most levels requires a real improvement project rather than an exam alone. The full certification status record is published in the Quality Statement.
