Some credentials are published and checkable. Others are a logo on a van.

That a named entity met the state requirements to trade and remains in good standing. It does not promise quality of work, but it is a fact recorded by a public body and it can be looked up, suspended, or found to have complaints against it.

For mold work, New York, Florida and Texas maintain their own arrangements and their own registers, separate from general contracting.

That someone passed a course and an examination set by a trade body. It is real training and it is meaningful, but it certifies a person or a firm against a private standard rather than a legal requirement, and the issuing body decides what is published about it.

The main water restoration standard is published by the IICRC and referred to throughout this trade. We name it in prose rather than link to it, because we could not find a public page confirming its contents that we were able to open and read — which is itself worth knowing before treating a badge as proof.

Certification is not nothing. It is simply a weaker check than a register, and it should be treated as the weaker one.

Ask for the certificate number and the issuing body, and ask how you would confirm it independently. A firm that can tell you exactly where to look is in a different position from one that cannot. Then weight it accordingly: as a claim rather than as a fact.

The checks you can always make are the licence register, the certificate of insurance direct from the insurer, and whether the entity on the invoice matches the entity on both.