>I just need an
> agreed benchmark that can be succinctly expressed and
> understood by all
> the people in the recruitment chain.
To follow up on my own post...
I work for a pan-european company and often need people with foreign
language skills of some nature. If I ask for someone with 'A level German'
that is a known standard. I don't mind if they ever took an A level in
German and passed, I just need to indicate a commonly known standard. If
they lived in Cologne for a year and learned that way, fine. (A level being
in the UK a two-year course taken between age 16 as part of school
education)
If I worked for a train company and hired train drivers I would NEED to
employ people with certification. Lives are at stake. Very precise and 100%
accurate familiarity with the relevant systems are needed. Rarely, I think,
do we need certification in this strong sense within the IT business.
So what we really need are Perl standards of competency. A certificate that
proves that at some point in time you knew Perl to that standard might be
useful. Or it might not. If you are a professional contractor you might be
bothered to get the certificate, but it's no big deal.
So, maybe the emphasis needs to be less on certification in the sense of
exams and tests and all that, and more on a way to define common and widely
accepted standards of competency....
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