Certification - Knowing Facts vs. Having Problem Solving Skills

[Andrew Eliasz]

I've been a trainer for well over 10 years now (Learning Tree, Hoskys,
Verhoef ...) -- courses C, C++, UNIX, Windows NT, Java, Networking .....,
and have taken and set a fair few MCQs in my time 

As regards Certification my thoughts are that 
- MCQs are good at testing factual knowledge, but poor at testing problem
solving skills 
- if I was to judge a potential system administrator I would expect them to
have a certain basic knowledge of core facts, but beyond that I would try
to find out how good they were at solving problems , automating repetitive
tasks ...
- for a senior application developer I would (having checked they are
familiar with the  common idioms and idiosyncracies of whatever language
they are using) want to find out how well they could come up with
meaningful abstractions , frameworks and interfaces
...

As other contributors have mentioned re-certifying every two years or so
when the technology is not changing that fast does not seem to be very
fruitful .... certification is a starting point (not a guarantee of
maturity) ...


Maybe what is needed in the long term is some sort of continuing education
program e.g. via fairly technical articles in something like the Linux
Journal, or the Perl Journal (and even in more technical journals such as
various ACM or BCS or IEEE journals) ...

However, first - let's get a baseline certification program in place, and
then lets sort out the wrinkles and deficiencies (hopefully not too many)
in it, and at the same time try and visualise the kind of continuous
education program that can drive the development of Open Source systems
forwards.


Regards

Andrew 



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