Skills and their certification are important determinants of the distribution of incomes and social inequality. Under China’s planned economy, workers in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) were trained by those SOEs according to the occupational standards of their industry. Occupational standards for cadres (party members and professionals), conversely, had a very discontinuous history. With SOE reforms in the 1990s, large numbers of workers became unemployed and needed to change careers. Confronting a social crisis and attempting to regulate the emerging labour market, the government created a system of Vocational and Professional Qualifications (VPQs) for the entire labour market. This chapter assesses these certificates’ effect on income distribution, first analysing their take-up rate (coverage) through exploratory analysis and then assessing their effect on salaries via OLS regression. In terms of data, it relies on a reconstruction of the certificate catalogue from policy documents, as well as data from the 2006 China General Social Survey. The results indicate that the new certificate system replicated pre-existing inequalities in the new labour market, rather than balancing them out. De facto inclusiveness was high in the state-bureaucratic system, where the certificates facilitated career advancement through skill formation. Conversely, in the private and informal sector, de facto inclusiveness was low because the certificates conveyed little added value there.