Today, society require their personnel to have professional abilities in variable fields. Verifying their professionalism is mostly scaled by their field-related certificates, and today's economical circumstance,
where the competition for jobs escalate, has lead this trend to the peak.
In particular, the Human Resource Development Service of Korea(HRDSK), which officially manages
national certificates, has entrusted much of their work to private organization sectors to issue certificates,
due to the overload in their tasks. The result to this has come to more than 1,000 private certificates
flooding the country. Therefore, this study was conducted through Daejon district's university students, and
analyzed the relation between the value of attaining certificates and electronic word-of-mouth. To achieve
this purpose, a research model and hypothesis was conducted based on preliminary research, and was dealt
with statistical analysis through a survey. The SPSS 21.0 was used for demographic analysis, and factor
and correlation analysis for validity and reliability. The AMOS 21.0 was also used to understand the
structural relation among the variations, resulting in the verification of the research hypothesis.
The research result has shown that all the variables chosen; future effectiveness, uniqueness in
technology, and public awareness; influenced electronic word-of-mouth. Notably, future effectiveness and
uniqueness in technology had a larger effect than public awareness. Satisfaction from acquiring certificates
was set as a parameter in the indirect analysis to the influence of online word-of-mouth, and showed that
the ranking of influence in the variables were public awareness, future effectiveness, and unique technology.
Acquiring satisfaction influenced positively on electronic word-of mouth. This study has also shown that the
reasons for acquiring certificates are for the means of better jobs, preparation for job insecurity, and to
have a competitive advantage among other university students. Consequently, universities should endeavor to
providing more opportunities in obtaining certificates.