On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 12:59:12PM -0600, John Bambenek wrote: > FWIW, I was trolling my employer Ernst & Young about a decade ago > about certifications so I took the CCNA one day after cramming a > book. Prior to the exam, I had never laid eyes on a cisco device, > much less interacted with one.
To that point, I think that a lot of us on this list could pull similar stunts with certification exams in areas where we have little to no experience simply because we're smart people and we know how to game those kinds of tests. Even more elaborate tests ("okay, this network is broken, figure it out and fix it") still don't yield the results that we want because it's simply not possible to make them varied enough. (That is, if someone is presented with 4 of these scenarios and fails all 4, that doesn't tell us how they'd do with 40. They might get 36 right. We just happened to hit them with 4 that they suck at. Another candidate might nail all 4, then botch the next 36. So what do we do to equalize this? Give them 80? Test design is not a solved problem.) In the end, all of this is an attempt to evade the issue, and that is, that screening/interviewing candidates is hard. It takes effort. It takes clue. It takes diligence. There's no shortcut without serious drawbacks. For my part, I focus on analytical and reasoning skills much more than knowledge base. I'll bet that I needed John to have, let's say, pf firewall configuration skills, and he presently had none, that I could tell him to go figure it out, and in a couple of weeks or so he'd have enough to do something useful. So if I were interviewing him for a gig where pf was significant, I wouldn't really care if he even knew what it is; I would care whether he showed the ability to pick up the basic concepts and learn the rest on-the-fly. Of course the HR department is absolutely incapable of figuring that out from either his resume or an interview. ---rsk _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.