A qualification is a claim about the past: at some point, under exam conditions, you knew a body of material. That claim was always a proxy for capability. It was a reasonable proxy while recalling material was itself hard.
The proxy stopped working
Recall is now free. A system can produce a textbook answer to any question a written exam could ask, which means passing that exam no longer distinguishes a candidate from a search box. Employers noticed this well before the education sector did.
If the exam can be passed by something that has never done the job, the exam has stopped measuring the job.
What replaces it
Competency-based assessment asks a different question — not what you know, but what you have done and what you decided while doing it. That is why the Bureau of International Professional Standards route is built on a portfolio and a professional discussion rather than a paper. An assessor can follow up. A written exam cannot.
What this means if you are early in your career
It is genuinely harder to start, and we should be honest about that. Foundation-level certification exists precisely because the portfolio route is closed to someone who has not yet shipped anything. The practical advice is to start collecting evidence earlier than feels natural: keep a record of what you decided and why, not just what you produced.