Hi, Dru.
Dru wrote:
Evan, I'd appreciate it if you could elaborate on what you mean by
this statement:
group has become extremely proficient at one aspect of a cert program
while _seeming_ to have bypassed the many others.
I'd hoped for a little more time on the list before wading in on this
:-). And I beg everyone not to read flamage into what I'm about to say,
especially since I'm a newcomer to the list. It's all intended to be
constructive even if it sounds otherwise. REALLY. :-) And, of course,
these are all my own opinions and I'm not speaking on behalf of anyone
but me.
The JTA report was an extremely nice piece of work. This group appears
to have the actual mechanics of planning and creating exams. What I
haven't seen on the website is any indication of:
1. The business plan and revenue model:
There _will_ come a time at which volunteer resources will meet their
limits. LPI has huge expenses in mundane things such as printing and
certificate delivery. Quality exam development and maintenance takes a
LOT of person-hours. Professional psychometricians aren't cheap and I
have yet to find one who will offer any freebies :-). VUE and Prometric
fees for publishing are quite high, especially in the early days when
they don't know how much money they'll be making off you. High-quality,
high-security translations don't come for free. And that's not even
counting promotional expenses. As a result, LPI didn't even _think_ of
starting in earnest until we had $300K in sponsorship funding.
What is the BSD cert's revenue model? How will proctors be paid? (Are
you willing to live with the risk of corruption of volunteer proctors?
We weren't.) Will there be official courseware that will augment the
exam revenue?
2. Actual demand
What numbers are envisioned for the certification? In 1999, LPI had
vendors such as Caldera, SuSE and Linuxcare telling us the demand was
there (and putting their sponsorship money where their mouths were). The
number projections will have many consequences in important decisions
(such as whether to use VUE or Prometric or partner with an existing
VUE/Prometric client or not to use them at all).
Furthermore, it's important to be aware if BSD admin is the kind of job
that would _really_ benefit from a certification. There are no big
vendors such as Red Hat or Novell pushing BSD certification as a way to
sell software or training. And certifications only succeed if people see
a _real_ payoff in better job prospects or more pay, especially
outsiders (existing Windows, Unix and Linux admins) looking to get
involved in BSD.
Who is the certification for? For an HR person, why would they demand a
BSD certification? For candidates, what kind of jobs would certification
get them that they couldn't get without a cert? Are there so many people
claiming to be skilled in BSD, and/or so many BSD jobs, that
certification is necessary in the hiring process? Or is it believed that
the mere existence of a certification will help drive jobs and/or use?
One thing that concerns me is that, judging from the cert's home page,
it almost appears that the cert is intended to be more of an advocacy
vehicle than an educational and standards initiative. I suggest caution
here. Advocacy is important, but IMO it should be seen as an indirect
benefit of certification. For the cert project, worry more about the
answer to "why get certified in BSD" than "why use BSD".
3. Partnerships
HR are a pretty lazy lot, and like to cover their behinds. When they're
told about a BSD certification, they'll want to know who else uses it.
Who requires it for jobs or contractors, who demands certified people
for their resellers or instructors, and who endorses it? The BSDcert
home page lists the four major BSD releases but that doesn't imply
endorsement or approval. Have people like Jordan or Theo come out to say
"this is a good thing"? This support could be especially important given
that the BSD cert might test things that exist in, say, FreeBSD that
don't exist in OpenBSD.
Forgive my ignorance of the BSD world. Linux has the Free Standards
Group, in which the various distributions agree on core components, file
placements, etc. that are common to all of them. And LPI has a pretty
close relationship with FSG, considering that FSG defines a software
standard and LPI creates a skills standard based upon it. Does such a
body exist to define a standard core that is absolutely common to all
the BSDs? Remember that certification is a standard, and there are
plenty of very good standards out there that nobody supports. (Wasn't
Betamax technically better than VHS?)
So... who supports the skills standard proposed by the BSD cert team?
The home page mentions Yahoo as a major user. Can they say something
useful? Once the cert is created will Yahoo require new BSD admins to be
certified? If people _within_ the BSD community can't be persuaded that
the cert project is a Good Thing, think how hard it'll be to get
outsiders interested. Endorsements will be KEY in getting short-term
publicity.
Yes, this could be derided as crass "marketing". But I personally
believe strongly that the philosophy of "if you build it they will come"
is not, and never will be, sufficient to drive the success of a cert.
And we haven't even started to talk about the complex relationships with
book publishers, courseware authors, and training companies. What appeal
does an accessible certification have if training is expensive and/or
hard to come by?
So, Dru, sorry you asked? :-)
Please believe that I do NOT want to be seen as being mainly negative or
wanting to put a damper on things, nor that this is a matter of real or
perceived competition with LPI. I want to do what I can to increase use
of ALL open source software. But for every success story like LPI there
are failures such as SAGE, and don't forget that right now the IT
certification world as a whole is in a tailspin. Part of my task with
LPI has been distancing it from the growing public dissatisfaction with
IT certification in general:
http://www.certmag.com/articles/templates/cmag_department.asp?articleid=705&zoneid=63
This task is difficult and far from complete. In order to get there, LPI
has had to be seen primarily as a standards body, secondarily as part of
a career-building and educational strategy, and distantly behind is the
broader growth of open source.
The cruel reality behind all this is that by comparison, the actual
making of a quality exam appears to be the easiest (and at least the
best understood) of the tasks at hand :-P.
- Evan
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