A new research center at Penn State University is inviting companies, facilities, manufacturers, distributors, and public-sector organizations to build the evidence base demonstrating the value of professional cleaning.

The cleaning industry has a credential gap

Every day, millions of workers clean hospitals, schools, office towers, airports, factories, aircraft, and transit systems. They control infection, protect food safety, and maintain the indoor environments on which public health depends. They do it with skill and chemical precision that most clients never see because there has been no consistent way to document, verify, or reward it.

That is the credential gap. And it is costing the entire industry. This is not a new problem. But the solution has a new name.

When expertise is invisible, providers compete on price alone. Clients cannot distinguish a rigorously trained workforce from an untrained one. Workers with genuine mastery have no portable proof of it. And when something goes wrong—a healthcare-associated infection, a food safety citation, a liability claim—neither the employer nor the client has documentation showing the workforce was qualified.

The solution is called microcredentialing. And it may be the most significant workforce development shift the cleaning, custodial, and facility management sector has seen in a generation.

What a microcredential is, and why it matters

A microcredential is a short, targeted qualification that documents what a worker can do, not just what they attended. Three features define it:

• Competency-based: The worker demonstrates a skill rather than just completing a module.
• Verifiable: An employer or client can confirm it independently.
• Stackable: It connects to a broader career pathway.

A microcredential documents what the worker can demonstrably do. If your facility manager client cannot confirm, in a matter of seconds, that the worker standing in front of them holds the credential they claim to hold, the credential is doing nothing for either of you. A quality microcredential is not a terminal destination; it is a step on a documented pathway toward something larger, such as a supervisory certification, a full professional designation, or a college-credit pathway.

This is not a new idea. ISSA’s Cleaning Management Institute (CMI) has issued competency-based custodial credentials since 1964—before anyone thought to call them microcredentials, before digital badges, and before the term “workforce development” had become its own professional domain. The American Hospital Association (AHA) explicitly labels its environmental services credentials “Micro-credentialing Programs” on its national certification center page. The cleaning sector invented this model. What’s new is the technology to verify credentials digitally, the institutional infrastructure to scale them, and, critically, the research to prove their business value.

A field guide to what already exists

The microcredential ecosystem for cleaning, custodial, and facility management is more developed than most practitioners realize. Real programs already operate across the cleaning sector:

• ISSA/CMI (Cleaning Management Institute): Certified Custodial Technician (Basic and Advanced) and Certified Custodial Supervisor; a career ladder operational since 1964. The longest-running competency-based credentialing system in the cleaning industry. Employers who have adopted the program document reduced worker injuries, lower turnover, and higher customer satisfaction scores.
• AHA/AHE CHEST (Certified Health Care Environmental Services Technician): If you want to see what a mature microcredential architecture looks like in the cleaning industry, look at the hospital environmental service workforce. The American Hospital Association (AHA) explicitly lists EVS microcredentials, from front-line technician through the Certificate of Mastery in Infection Prevention, with a Train-the-Trainer model that certifies supervisors to credential entire departments in-house. The programs are administered by the Association for the Health Care Environment (AHE), an American Hospital Association (AHA) subsidiary, and they form a complete career ladder.
• NCREST^™ (NORMI^™ Certified Risk-Based Environmental Sanitation Technician): Grounded in OSHA standards and pathogen transmission science, this six-module curriculum covers how germs spread through five transmission pathways and reservoirs in the built environment. Rather than teaching workers what to clean, it teaches them why specific cleaning decisions matter for health outcomes.
• CloroxPro HealthyClean: The Trained Specialist Certificate and Trained Manager Certificate are ANAB-accredited (ANSI National Accreditation Board), an independent external quality stamp that distinguishes them from unmarked product completion certificates.
• Solenis/Diversey Hygiene Academy: CPD-accredited (Continuing Professional Development) multilingual e-learning for food and beverage manufacturing environments and built on a corporate learning management system with a regulatory audit trail meeting the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) 21 CFR (Code of Federal Regulations) Part 11 documentation requirements.
• MICOO (Microcredentials Made Open and Organised): A European Commission microcredentialing platform issues credentials through a Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) model. Workers earn credentials by demonstrating what they know and can do, evaluated by certified assessors. No training required. Just proof. It is the next logical step for the U.S. sector.

These programs exist. What the industry lacks is rigorous, independent evidence that they deliver measurable results. That credentialed workers stay longer, are injured less, and produce outcomes that clients can see and value. Without that evidence, microcredentials remain a training option rather than a competitive business tool. That is the gap the Center for Evidence Based Cleaning is designed to close.

The Center for Evidence Based Cleaning

The Center for Evidence Based Cleaning (CEBC) is an industry-facing research and translation hub anchored at Penn State University, which operates within ISSA’s Making Safer Choices initiative. Its mission is not to create new credential programs. It is to build the scientific foundation that makes the best existing programs provably worth doing, and to translate that evidence into the standards and business tools the industry can use.

Penn State brings research rigor, faculty expertise in workforce development and occupational health, and an existing microcredential platform—Penn State Beyond Engineering—that already delivers short-form professional credentials in manufacturing and engineering. The CEBC directs that infrastructure toward the needs of the cleaning sector workforce.

Most cleaning credentials are still physical cards or paper certificates. They cannot be verified with a smartphone on a job site, shared on a LinkedIn profile, checked by a building inspector in the field, or embedded with the metadata that tells an employer exactly what competency was demonstrated and how it was assessed. The New York City Department of Buildings (NYC DOB) deployed a digital Worker Wallet for construction site safety credentials in July 2025. That infrastructure does not exist at scale for the cleaning industry.

The CEBC will commission independent studies answering the questions the industry cannot yet answer: Do credentialed cleaning workers have lower injury and turnover rates? Do building service contractors (BSCs) with credentialed workforces win more bids and retain clients longer? What credential design features predict better worker outcomes? Why should a company spend US$300 per worker on a training credential instead of informal on-the-job training? You should be able to answer and cite evidence.

Right now, that evidence largely does not exist for the cleaning sector. The studies that have been done are either conducted by credential providers themselves, creating an inherent conflict of interest, or use research designs too weak to withstand scrutiny. The cleaning industry has operated under competency-based credentials for six decades without systematically measuring their impact. These are not abstract academic questions.

What this means for your operation

BSCs and cleaning companies can partner with the CEBC to design internal credential programs and participate in outcome studies. Companies that contribute workforce data to independent analysis will be the first to benefit from findings that substantiate their training investments and the first to use those findings in client conversations.

Facility owners and managers in healthcare, education, commercial real estate, transportation, and government can use CEBC research to write credential requirements into service contracts and requests for proposals (RFPs). When clients require verified credentials, the market moves.

Product manufacturers and distributors can co-develop credential programs that position product categories around evidence-based competency rather than marketing alone. A cleaning professional credentialed in a manufacturer’s application domain is a long-term advocate and repeat buyer. CEBC product-category credential standards will help manufacturers build that credibility independently.

Public-sector organizations, municipal governments, school districts, transit authorities, convention centers, and federal agencies can connect workforce development funding to CEBC-evaluated programs, ensuring that public training dollars flow to credentials with documented outcomes.

Professional associations and credentialing bodies, ISSA, AHE, National Organization of Remediators and Microbial Inspectors (NORMI), Institute of Inspection, Cleaning, and Restoration Certification (IICRC), and others can partner with the CEBC to build the evidence foundation that makes the best existing programs provably worth doing, and to establish quality standards that help the market distinguish genuine microcredentials from marketing badges.

The competitive signal is already shifting

The cleaning industry operates at the intersection of public health, facility safety, and workforce development. It has done so for generations without the scientific credibility that other infrastructure sectors take for granted. The Center for Evidence Based Cleaning is building that credibility by producing the evidence, establishing the standards, and forging the partnerships that make cleaning expertise visible, verifiable, and valued.

The infrastructure is being built. A significant percentage (97%) of employers are now exploring skills-based hiring. Clients who previously accepted “trained and experienced” as a sufficient answer are increasingly asking for something they can verify. The question is: Are you going to help build it, or are you going to explain later why you didn’t?

The Center for Evidence Based Cleaning connects Penn State University’s academic expertise with workforce development needs across the cleaning, custodial, and facility management industries. For research partnership and collaboration inquiries, email [email protected] or complete the form on the Making Safer Choices website at issa.com/making-safer-choices.