Wes Kussmaul wrote:
Most importantly, you need a source of public authority that can grant and revoke professional licenses.
No IT certification is a "professional license". To get to that stage you would not be able to practice in the field without such a license, and I don't know of a jurisdiction on earth that applies such licensing to IT administration.
IMO, the public suggestion that a BSD certification should be mandatory in order to practice will probably raise enough outraged reaction to seriously hurt the program's attempts to get off the ground.
The whole OS community is in some ways mimicking the posture of commercial operating system vendors and certification authorities in glibly presenting themselves as a source of (quasi public) authority.
It is out of touch with reality to suggest that recognized certification bodies -- in IT or elsewhere -- must be public or even quasi-public. NOCA specs mandate that one person on the board of a cert body must represent the public interest -- that hardly makes the body "quasi public" in any real sense of accountability. (However, that rule is enough to keep most IT certs from meeting NOCA specs, which was in part why LPI is the first and only IT cert to be recognized by NOCA).
As for the offensive painting of the entire IT cert world as "glib", including bodies such as ISC2 and LPI and SAGE who *are* trying to bring professional standards to the field, that doesn't justify response.
It's in error to state that vendors are presenting themselves as authorities of anything more than measuring expertise in their products. Few vendors seek public official endorsements of their cert programs. Their certs' value is to the users of their products, not to the public good -- I don't know of any commercial cert vendors that have positioned themselves otherwise.
- Evan _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
