Where to check, and where to complain

Three questions, answered country by country. Each answer was confirmed against the publisher's own primary source, or is marked as not found.

Most career advice tells you to "do your research" and stops there. These are the places research is actually possible — and, just as usefully, the places where it is not.

All three registers answer questions that decide real money. What a course actually leads people to earn is the only honest test of whether it is worth its fee, and a handful of governments will tell you because they match graduate records against tax records. Who regulates a training provider decides whether you have any recourse when one lies to you — and it is rarely the education ministry, because what happened to you was a misleading commercial claim rather than a teaching failure. And whether your market forces employers to publish pay decides whether any salary figure you find was audited or merely reported by somebody with a reason to round up.

Each row was checked against the publisher's own primary source or is marked as not found. Nothing here is compiled from a secondary summary of a regulator, because a summary of a regulator is exactly the kind of source this research grades at 4.

These registers tell you where to look. What to do with what you find is Chapter 7, which walks through checking a school, a bootcamp or a certificate before you pay for it — free, and the longest chapter in Part I, because training can be the largest payment a person makes before earning anything at all.

Two rules govern these tables and they are not decoration. A row marked unverified has not been confirmed against a primary source and must be treated as a lead, not a fact. And none found means exactly that — it is a statement about the search, not a finding that no enforcement exists. Several of these bodies publish almost nothing in English and work mainly through mediation.