Would a creating a PF certification be worth putting some effort into?
The reason I'm asking is that the good people over at The BSD
Certification Group (http://www.BSDCertification.org/) are pondering
that very question, and they contacted me about it. My response was
essentially "yes, it would be useful to have a certification, mainly
because it would make PF (and by extension, OpenBSD and the other
BSDs) move visible at the suits level, making a useful certification
would be a lot of work, though".
A lot of work, and making it into a useful certification depends
critically on Subject Matter Experts (aka SMEs, or please look in the
mirror) and the quality of the work they do when specifying the task
requirements that go into the certification specification.
BSDCertification.org is, as we can read in their faq[1],
'committed to developing a testing methodology which tests real
world skills and is not just a "paper certification". '
or, in layman's terms "our starting point is the best possible set of
answers to the question, 'what would be the required or optimal skills
be for somebody to fill a position in the field of the certification?' ".
Once the task and skills spec is complete, test construction starts,
and finally a psychometrician is set to work to check that the test
actually provides a valid result for the specification, that it lets
candidates with the right skills pass while others will fail. You can
read a more detailed description over at the bsdcertification.org web
site, but I think I've covered the key points here.
So, my fellow PF SMEs, would you like to be involved in this, and
contribute to creating a PF certification. I would like to have your
input, including but not limited to 'would it be more useful with a
multi-level certification', and of course any input on what the task
and skills spec should contain.
[1] http://www.bsdcertification.org/index.php?NAV=FAQ#Q04
--
Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team
http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/
"Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic"
delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
