An explanation of Pre and Post-nominal letters

Accepted convention dictates that individuals may be authorised to display letters or abbreviations before or after their name indicating their social status or that they hold official appointments, honours, degrees or membership of learned societies.

Pre-nominal titles indicate profession (eg Doctor, Professor, Reverend), social title (eg Mr, Mrs, the Honourable, Sir), or military rank (eg Captain, Major, Sergeant).

Post-nominal letters indicate honours, appointments, degrees and memberships.

Honours and Awards cannot be in dispute as they are awarded by the government on behalf of the monarchy (MBE, CBE, VC, DFC).

Appointments include appointments to the Queen (ADC), politicians (MP, MEP) and legal positions (QC, JP)

Degrees awarded by universities (BSc, PhD).

Learned Societies limited to those holding a Royal Charter (MRCVS, FZS).

As this system is only bound by convention and not governed by law recent years have seen some practices that were not originally intended, drift into common usage.

Some qualifications other than degrees or are now awarded post nominal letters such as PGCE and Cert Ed but it should be noted that they are still awarded by universities or official regulatory authorities. A qualification is not simply any course of training or education, in order to be a qualification it must be one of two things:

1. a) Academic. In order to satisfy academic criteria it must appear on one of the formal qualification frameworks approved by Ofqual or equivalent, this does not include what is known as customised provision which covers virtually all of the animal training and behaviour courses.
2. b) Professional. An approved regulatory authority may award post nominal letters to those who have met the requirements to be recognised by that body as competent practitioners of their skill.

Anything that is not described by either of these two categories is not a qualification and should not legitimately attract post-nominal letters. If post nominal letters are associated with such courses they are usually issued by the course provider and not a professional authority, it is usually done for marketing purposes solely to infer a greater value or worth than actually exists.

Professions were historically limited to Religion, Medicine and Law however by the end of the 19^th Century, Teaching, Social Work and peripheral occupations of the original three such as Nursing, Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy also claimed professional status. In recent decades many have sought to trade off the social status afforded to established professions by altering the accepted meaning of ‘profession’ to simply that of a vocation that provides an income, thus completely undermining the original value in being a true professional. An indication that someone has successfully undergone the required education and training to be assessed as competent can be indicated by post nominal letters such as VN (Veterinary Nurse) or CEng (Chartered Engineer). In order to be a bona fide profession there must be an authoritative regulatory body with the power to decide upon appropriate levels of education and the right to admit and discipline members with some degree of monopoly of rights.

The proliferation of post nominal letters that indicate completion of courses that are self proclaimed is both confusing and without worth serving to simply undermine established traditional values, especially when many of the courses are set at little more (sometimes less) than the equivalent of a GCSE. Such letters are worthless and the deception is often perpetuated when people use their meaningless letters to appear highly qualified to unsuspecting pet owners. It would be laughable to place a list of GCSEs after your name on a business card and that is how most of these post nominal are regarded by those who are properly qualified.

David Montgomery