I personally dont know how you'd make a career of just social engineering. SE is a part of a bigger animal. I dont even know of any certs in this arena.

Are you asking how to get into security or specifically SE?

+1

There's [free] videos over at Academic Earth too, one class taught at Berkeley, then a full course taught at Yale:

http://academicearth.org/subjects/psychology

Thanks for the replies.  My question was mis-formed and I'm surprised that anyone was able to target in on what I meant, especial so well.  My purpose was to inquire as to a cert path that would help me in Social Engineering and shore up my skills on the technical end.  The psych class suggestion was one avenue I had considered.  I'm looking into a future career in security with an emphasis on the Social Engineering aspects.  Possibly as part of a pentesting career.  Right now, I have interests and motivation but not a course.  I will check the video courses and see about opening a dialog with Chris Hadnagy and Dave Kennedy.  Thanks for the insight and redirecting my question to a answerable one.

I was a psych major for 1.5 years but I'm a really bad social engineer in person or over the phone. It's a much different story when I can establish my scenarios in written text. Some people just don't have the gift of gab required for really exploiting trust and I don't think it's something you can learn. The concepts of how to modify behavior, and learning what makes people tick and how trust relationships work is invaluable and trainable, but delivery is a whole different animal. I recommend recruiting a hot chick to help. It's way more effective than any pretexting scenario you can deliver yourself (usually)

That fixes a lot of "issues"...  Might even create new ones.

Here are some out of the box suggestions in no particular order:

1. Confidence - This comes with being secure with your knowledge of a technology and/or situation. Experience helps here, too. So go practice. Pick up some women, will you?

2. Take an acting course and a public speaking course. Try some improv games with your friends. Helps you be swift on your feet when something is thrown at you that's not expected.

3. Always have an out. Oh I'm sorry, I was looking for the bathroom. Oops... I am so lost. Or is Dr. Smith's office in this building? This goes along with a couple concepts we may or may not be familiar with. First is the lawyer's creed not to ask a question to which you don't know an answer. Or to go the magic route, the magician's choice makes it look like the victim is in control, but you really are. Look it up.

Just some quick thoughts that I hope help point you in some directions to research and eventually try.

Don

Depending on your definition of Social Engineering you can do it full time, however in my experience you will have other skillsets to leverage also.

There are no specific certifications for SE, however there are some workshops at conferences that talk about social engineering, and red team engagements that would be of benefit.

My suggestion is to study the following areas:

Psychology
Neuro Linguistic Programming | Hypnosis
Micro Expressions
Body Language
Neuroscience
I personally also recommend study of Illusionists, Mentalists and Magicians.

Good luck on your journey.