As a champion of human resource management, professional certification and continuous learning, I’m excited about Microsoft’s purchase of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion, along with the buzz this deal has created.

The Microsoft-LinkedIn deal will certainly mean new tools for HR departments. But more exciting is how this huge bet places a premium on the HR’s role in business. In addition, the purchase has the potential to change the way we think about education, ongoing professional development, certification, and how businesses ― specifically HR leaders ― must begin to view Human Capital Management (HCM) to remain competitive in the 21^st century.

Here are my thoughts on how Microsoft-LinkedIn could impact certification:

A Big Boost for Certification

As the CEO of HR Certification Institute® (HRCI®), I’m thrilled to see Microsoft enter the broader competency marketplace. In recent decades, perhaps no group of workers has come on to voluntarily embrace the value of certification more than IT professionals. Microsoft has been a major player in that development.

Over HRCI’s 40-year history, more than a half million HR professionals have earned HRCI credentials to demonstrate mastery as human resource management practitioners. We join other successful organizations, such as the Project Management Institute (PMI), where certification is earned and valued. Still, to date, there is a segment of workers in any given profession who have not made certification a priority. In fact, there are still entire professions that don’t have bona fide certification or licensure organizations validating the mastery of that profession.

Microsoft’s bet on LinkedIn ― it’s largest purchase ever ― is a clarion call in support of professional certification across all practices. With a complete suite of people management solutions, Microsoft and LinkedIn can inject new and meaningful energy into a fragmented competency marketplace.

A New Era of Career Fitness

For professionals, the Microsoft-LinkedIn deal is another example that we have entered what I like to think of as the “career fitness” era. Workers from all professionals, including HR, must remain in professional shape to meet the demands of today’s high-performance organizations. And they must demonstrate their abilities with post-graduate medals, certifications and other marks of excellence that prove they have what it takes to meet increasing workplace demands.

“LinkedIn has a unique advantage in the education space, in that they are the only place where hundreds of millions of people are voluntarily giving their longitudinal job and education history ― which allows potentially for some unique analysis of what programs and courses or certifications actually lead to improved career paths,” explains education consultant Michael Feldstein, quoted by the Quartz news outlet.

In the HR world, a preponderance of HR job openings already require HRCI credentials. It is one of the many reasons HRCI certification holders value their designations and make use of HRCI digital badges on sites such as LinkedIn to clearly demonstrate HR mastery, with a few clicks.

The Microsoft-enhanced LinkedIn platform will likely create a better marketplace for such digital markers of career fitness, enhancing the value of best-in-class credentials and downgrading certificates that can be gained without rigor or any real measurable competency of a profession’s body of knowledge.

Embracing Lifelong Achievers

Career fitness also requires continuous learning.

Quartz also notes that LinkedIn owns Lynda.com, the largest Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider. With Microsoft and its long history of providing certifications in the IT space, LinkedIn services could transform learning development opportunities and provide targeted courses to help professionals and professions increase productivity in new ways. Networking opportunities also abound.

By purchasing LinkedIn, I believe Microsoft sees what HR professionals have recognized for quite some time. Today’s professionals can no longer sustain their career fitness through university programs alone.

While providing an essential foundation for the workforce of tomorrow, university programs of the future must be augmented with linkages to strong certification programs and continuous learning opportunities. In the rapidly changing business world we now live in, this is the only way today’s workers can both demonstrate and maintain ongoing commitment to knowledge, experience and ability to drive business performance.

Exciting Times Ahead

In conclusion, the Microsoft-LinkedIn deal is a $26.2 billion investment in HR’s transformation as a major player to influence business success. It’s a huge endorsement of HR’s future to lead business.

In addition, LinkedIn’s workspace presence combined with Microsoft’s analytical expertise could finally unlock the door to understanding the true value of legitimate credentials, continuous career development, and third-party endorsements of skills and competencies for all professions. This will allow professionals to better showcase their unique skills and knowledge. It will also help businesses to more precisely match the right people to jobs, and do a better job of embracing continuous learning to keep talent on the cutting edge of high performance.

It’s an exciting time in the human-capital space.