Is It Fair to Count Lockdown Months as Work Experience for Employee Certificates?

I am from a small institute registered as a Private Limited company with 11 employees. A few employees joined during October 2019 and September 2019, and now they are claiming a one-year completion experience certificate. Please suggest if it's valid to issue an experience certificate for one year, whereas the employee has actually worked for 6 months prior to the lockdown. This confusion is because of the lockdown situation. Please advise.

Whether an employee worked or not, whether there was a lockdown or not, each employee is eligible to receive an experience certificate from their Date of Joining (DOJ) to Last Working Day (LWD).

Hope this resolves your query.

Thanks,
Dinesh Divekar

Some people have been working in your company since September 2019, and some since October 2019. The lockdown affected operations in March 2020. However, all the employees have been on the payroll of your company since September 2019 or October 2019 onwards. Therefore, without any hesitation, you can issue an experience certificate from their date of joining services to their exit date.

I have a different take from my learned colleagues. An employment certificate and an experience certificate are two different things. In your case, the employees have been in your employment for one year, but due to the pandemic, they could not work for six months. Therefore, stating that they have one year of experience in your organization would be incorrect.

In my view, it would be appropriate for you to issue a certificate stating that their period of employment is from the Date of Joining (DOJ) to the last date, but acknowledging that due to the pandemic, they actually worked from ---- to ----.

Regards, Vinayak Nagarkar HR and Employee Relations Consultant