On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 08:17:40AM -0500, John Adams wrote:
> >You miss the point: no certification is in any way valid, by definition.
> >Any business depending on it will be wasting its time.
>
> I guess I don't understand this. How does, for instance, a PE
> certification damage engineering? How does passing the bar exam damage
> law? How does being a member of the appropriate medical society (and the
> certification, including putting those little letters on his nameplate)
> make my prosthodontist less competent?
These certifications are not handed out by businesses that charge for
training and examination of a specific skill. They are examinations to
determine the competence of the applicant to enter the professional society.
Entrance in the professional society is an assertion by that society that
a person has the requisite skills and moral/ethical grounding to perform
the job they seek to perform.
The canonical example of a for-profit training organization is Novell.
A few years ago, Novell lost the fileserver market because so many
features were bundled into WinNT. Yet a lot of large organizations
were still entrenched in Novell's offerings and needed CNE's and such
to maintain them. For a significant period of time (a couple of years
I think), Novell's biggest revenue stream was from training, not software
sales.
As far as certification within IT, it does make a fair amount of
sense for Cisco, Sun, Oracle, etc. to offer certification. The
last thing any business wants is someone off the street to manage
a network and inadvertantly cut it off from the outside world for
a few days, a sysadmin who screws up sendmail.cf and can't fix it
(or recover it), or a DBA who manages to irrecoverably corrupt all
of the sales figures for the third quarter.
Now, certification for a programming language is a different matter
entirely. I don't see that it's relevant for Perl, because Perl
users serve many roles, including some that are fundementally different
than those of certified engineers, physicians, lawyers and sysadmins.
Z.
