(FORTUNE Magazine) – Outside of online investment chat rooms and job reviews, resumes rule the genre of personal business fiction. The first-person characters are heroic, always seeking new and challenging opportunities. The plots typically feature a succession of managerial missions accomplished. The most exaggerated prose is usually a matter of degree--like the MBA, the Ph.D., or the aptly named BS.

While it's stunning how many people attempt to smuggle deceptive diplomas onto their CVs, even more astonishing is that so many truly legitimate degrees are so utterly meaningless. Precisely what does a diploma warrant? A computer science baccalaureate cum laude says what about the digital abilities of its recipient? A top finance MBA from the nation's 34th-ranked business school understands Black-Scholes how much better than that clever MBA from the school ranked 21st? There are good reasons that recruiters often take GREs more seriously than GPAs.

Recall that barely five years ago "e-commerce" was the buzzword that birthed multibillion-dollar Nasdaq valuations. Today, dozens of schools all over the world aggressively market their degree programs in e-commerce and e-business. Pray tell, precisely when did these learned academic institutions acquire their expertise to grant graduates diplomas in these new "disciplines"? Just what does a degree in e-commerce mean anyway?

Of course, that's the wrong question. A more useful question is, What will give these degrees their meaning? The short answer: the marketplace. But there's another answer too: certification. Increasingly, meritocracies will be measured by the certificatocracy. In the future you will need to be certifiable to succeed.

Lawyers must pass the bar; accountants had better have a CPA; financial advisors should possess CFAs. Board-certified medical specialists tend to earn significantly more than those who aren't. The certification sensibility already extends deep into the fastest-growing segments of the new economy. While a computer science degree is nice, being a Certified Novell Engineer, a Microsoft Certified Sys- tems Engineer, or a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert is often a far better bet for boosting one's value. In fact, vendor-driven and vendor-defined certification programs have become both market and marketing mechanisms for building brand equity and a skilled talent pool.

In markets where the half-life of useful knowledge shrinks and the importance of new knowledge accelerates, educational artifacts like university degrees become anachronisms. Employers and workers alike crave more timely and objective ways to assess who knows what. No one wants to fall into the trap of having "five years of experience" mean "one year of experience five times over." Almost by default, certification is becoming the essential risk-management tool for human capital. Run well, certification programs are win-win-win. The certifiers benefit; the certified benefit; and so does any customer, client, or employer who relies on the certification.

That should explain why, within a decade, every market leader in every global industry will offer certification programs for its key employees. With or without university partners, a FedEx or Ryder will provide accredited degrees in "logistics management"; a GE Capital or AIG will certify expertise in "financial risk assessment"; an Oracle/Kaiser Permanente will profitably collaborate to train hospital administrators in "health-care delivery database management." Pass the appropriate WPP or Omnicom exams, and you, too, will be certified for "quantitative principles of media planning." Indeed, if you don't have the courage or creativity to certify the results, what's the point of a training or professional-development initiative?

The real problem with today's human capital marketplace is that education and training is far less of an issue than how that training and education is recognized and rewarded. Grand utopian visions of the Internet as virtual university have thus been completely misunderstood. The real future online isn't in educating people; it's in testing them. The future of professionalism won't be endless rounds of continuing education; it's going to be endless rounds of certifying that education.

What technology will do is transform the meaning and value of the certification process. For example: Require people to hot-link the certification credential listed on their online resume to the site. One click, and employers can confirm the score on the certification test; another click, and they can see the test questions; click again, and they can see the specific answers. Technology can make the certification process as transparent as a pane of glass. That would certainly make the certification marketplace far more efficient--and maybe even more effective--than today's academic degree-granting marketplace. Regardless of how unpleasant a professional future of perpetual testing may seem, the trend toward ever greater levels of certification is sure to stand the test of time.

MICHAEL SCHRAGE is co-director of the MIT Media Lab's e-markets initiative and author of Serious Play. Reach him at michael_schrage@fortunemail.com.