Last year, i did some HR development consulting for some local military
equipment crew which was trained by a foreign superpower.
Their no.1 requirement:
Transfer of know how via log book kept by local counterpart, when
learning from expartriate engineer.
Their No.1 issue:
Few hardly upkeep their log books. And hardly anyone to review of them.
My no.1 recommendation:
Institute examination standards and independent drill tests.
IMHO, log books is a very hi-effort, hi-initiative endeavour. It is
highly relevant in high risk careers such as aircraft crew, but for on
the ground desktop BigMac munchers, a well generated test regime such as
done by SCJP (Java) and CCNA (Cisco) should suffice. In fact CCNA test
questions are experienced based where without experience you would fail.
Log books are also quite subjective requiring good counterpart reviewers
to read what is written and provide a measurable benchmark to it.
Professional exams are a quick way to say if you got the minimal skillsets.
On 4/2/11 1:09 AM, Boh Yap wrote:
hi all,
to widen this discussion....
Personally, I'm against certification as the SOLE means of selection,
maybe its because of our over emphasis of A's in exams, that produced
'qualified' but incompetent personnel. Also perhaps of the many MCSE's
out there, who are trained to click buttons... and setup servers with
security holes.
On the other hand, i can understand employers and HR departments
needs, at least in using certification as the 1st level filtering
process.
However a knowledgeable interviewer will very quickly sort out how
much the interviewee knows about Linux or programming. Both of these
are practical skills, and experience counts, especially when they have
encountered problems, solved them ad learnt from it. Unfortunately,
for organizations that are going into FLOSS for the first time, may
not have the expertise to conduct interviews for FLOSS personal.
Perhaps we can borrow some techniques form another hands-on skilled
based profession, airline pilots. Pilots are required to keep a log
book, especially during their 'training' period, where they record the
no. hours flown, the routes that they flew and problems that they may
have encountered. Perhaps Linux sysadmins should do the same, keep a
log of the servers they setup, distro, disk partitions& file system
setup, software installed, backup systems used etc... If Linux
professional were to do this, then its very easy for a prospective
employer to asses his capabilities.
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