<snippage> > What are your thoughts about having some sort of certification for > working with computers? Like a doctor or nurse or pilot or even a > flight attendant? I mean, come on, a plumber? <snippage>
There is a group that does something called the Certified Data Processor (CDP). Some years ago, when I was part of NaSPA, there was a discussion about this (somewhere before 1997). It is interesting that the State of NJ decided to make it happen, having the DP/IT group report to the Board of Cosmetology (I kid you not, they were going to have data processing professionals subject to a board for certifying Hair Dressers!!). There was a big hue and cry and this got stopped. Texas had some talks about it and that faded out to nothing. Many of us asked some questions about how would we certify people? How could we keep the tests current? Being a Certified VTAM USS person is not all that useful (if you don't know the real difference, just drop it and don't start), while being a certified VTAM SNA Network person with the SNI endorsement might have been a good thing. Then there is the JES3 Installation and Maint Cert. etc. etc. As you can see, the VTAM certs would not be good today because of the number of places that are really TCP oriented. This brought up the arguments about how long should a cert be good for? Being an SMP/E certified SYSPROG would probably be one of those things where the CERT would have meaning for 10 years or more. Today, having a SYSPLEX CERT would probably be a very good thing. AMDAHL DOMAIN certifications would be nearly worthless today. But an IBM LPAR certification might be good. Now, you can start to see what CERTs someone would need to have to be a "MASTER" SYSPROG. OK, now let's look at TSO, ISPF, HLASM, IPCS, etc. How would you determine if someone was good with TSO native commands -- would it require being able to edit some short file with the TSO native editor? HLASM: have to write a macro given certain specs, while writing a program that calculates how much money you would have, had you been paid $12.00 (US) in 1790 for some island off the east coast of the US, using 5% interest, binary arithmetic, conversion to packed decimal with floating a dollar sign (EDMK stuff) -- up to July 15th, 1996? Would that demonstrate that you could program in assembly language or that you should be doing banking programming? Who do we get to handle these things? SHARE? NaSPA? IBM? I'm all for it. But in all the discussions I've seen to date, they collapse under some argument or another. Regards, Steve Thompson ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
