I've recently been doing a fair amount of reading about how craftsmanship worked in late medieval and renaissance Europe -- think crafts guilds of Florence, which were the societal context where the Medici happened and Leonardo da Vinci and many of those good things.

One of the things that jumped out at me was that gatekeeping was institutionalized at the guild-level, rather than the level of the individual company.

You only had to prove to the guild of wool once that you knew how to work with wool at the master craftsman level, and then the individual merchants and companies within the same guild would accept that more or less at face value.

If there were repeated complaints about your craftsmanship, those, too, surfaced at the guild level rather than just the individual company level, and might put an end to your guild membership.

It would be really cool if the ACM, BCS, IEEE, or any one of those professional associations, started doing something like that, i.e. you could just be an "IEEE-certified dude who friggin just knows what they're doing". Then companies could just say "people without IEEE-certification at the master craftsman level need not apply", instead of giving people exams of technical competence that are insulting to the people who will actually pass them.

On the other end of the lifecycle, an employer who finds an employee repeatedly falling short on craftsmanship could report that person to the IEEE, and they would investigate the complaint and revoke certification if appropriate.

Also: This is how it works for doctors & lawyers, and some other kinds of professionals. I don't understand why it wouldn't be equally useful in Software Engineering to have such a system.