In France, the diploma is equivalent to competence. When leading APP groups, it is humility that makes a professional. Not the title.
The diploma has never led a group. Humility, yes.
France has a unique relationship with diplomas. She sees it as a skill. In relational professions, this confusion not only produces poorly oriented trajectories. It weakens entire systems supposed to support the most exposed teams. The Analysis of Professional Practices is the clearest indicator of this.
I. The diploma as a screen
There is a deeply rooted belief in France: he who has the title knows how to do it. This logic, inherited from an education system built on the accumulation of certifications, has structured generations of careers. It also produced considerable blind spots.
In the health, social and medico-social sectors, this blind spot has a specific face. We are recruiting Professional Practices Analysis group leaders on the basis of their diploma. It is assumed that a psychologist, an experienced healthcare executive, a professional with a master’s degree in human sciences will be naturally competent to play this role. The logic seems solid. She is not.
The diploma attests to an academic background. It says nothing about the ability to maintain a group framework, to problematize a complex professional situation, to maintain a rigorous intervention posture in the face of teams under tension. It’s not the same thing. It’s not the same learning. And confusing the two has a real cost for the professionals who sit in these groups with the hope of finding a structured space for reflection.
The race to obtain a diploma is not in itself the problem. The problem is what she avoids looking at: the posture, the professional humility, the ability to not know right away and to hold it without collapsing. These qualities are not obtained by submitting a dissertation. They cultivate themselves, train themselves, supervise themselves.
II. What the Analysis of Practices reveals that diplomas do not measure
The Analysis of Professional Practices is a demanding system. Its purpose is not therapeutic. It is also not informative in the classic sense of the term. It aims to enable professionals confronted with complex situations to work on them collectively, to problematize them, and to identify operational benchmarks.
Maintaining this system requires precise skills: building and maintaining a framework, guiding problematization without directing the content, reading group dynamics without getting lost, restoring without interpreting. These skills are not included in any standard clinical psychology framework. Nor are they acquired by having participated in PBL groups as a professional. The position of participant and the position of speaker are not variations of the same role. They require distinct learning.
What the APP reveals is that the value of a stakeholder is measured by their ability to stay behind their own expertise, to resist the urge to resolve, to tolerate uncertainty without filling it prematurely. This work is work on oneself as much as technical work. It requires precisely what the logic of the diploma tends to erode: humility.
Professional humility is not a kind disposition of character. It’s a functional skill. It conditions the quality of the system, the safety of the participants, and the real usefulness of the space created. It is not written on any parchment. It is worked on over time, with appropriate support.
III. Revalorizing humanist values in professional qualifications
The trends are there, observable on the ground. More and more professionals from various backgrounds are seeking training in running APP groups: nurses, social workers, former executives, coaches, psychologists undergoing postural reconversion. This movement says something important. He says that the competence of APP intervener cannot be reduced to a disciplinary box. It is built from a different starting point: sensitivity to relational professions, the desire to remain at the service of the sector, and often, precisely, a doubt about one’s own legitimacy.
This doubt deserves to be rehabilitated. In a professional field where certainty is often confused with competence, reflective humility is an indicator of rigor. It signals an ability to question one’s practice, to not be satisfied with an acquired status, to continue to train. This is precisely what the teams hosted in APP groups have the right to expect from those who support them.
Professionalizing Practice Analysis means agreeing to move the cursor. Not from the diploma towards improvisation, but from the diploma towards specific, anchored, supervised training. It is recognizing that certain values such as humility, commitment to connection, compassionate sensitivity constitute professional foundations in their own right, transmissible and evaluable.
This is not an idealistic position. It is an ethical necessity for a sector which can no longer afford to waste the time of the teams who invest in it.
The diploma opens doors. He doesn’t say anything about what we do once inside. In spaces where exhausted professionals come to work on the complexity of their practice, what matters is not the title of the person holding the group. It is its ability to hold the frame, maintain the correct posture and develop reflexivity. This ability has a name. It can be learned. And it often begins where the diploma leaves off.
