Hello, Jon. Good questions.
Jon Drews wrote:
1) How many LPI Tests are administered each month?
About 2500 on average, but it varies pretty wildly month-to-month. LPI
will likely hit #100K later this year, and the first exams were given in
early 2000.
2) In which countries is certification held in low regard? In what
countries is it deemed most desirable?
"Held in high/low regard" and "desirable" are subjective commentaries.
The only thing quantifiable is exam sales, and I don't know if that
correlates directly to level of respect. As I suggested before, even if
an exam is most highly respected, few will actually take it unless it
offers a tangible career benefit. People will sit back and admire the
effort but won't actually make use of it.
Have a look at Certification Magazine (http://www.certmag.com) over a
few months if you want an eye-opening view into how crass and mercenary
the IT certification and training world can get. They do salary surveys,
so that people looking to change careers can "certification shop" and
see what credential will offer the biggest salary boost with the lest
investment in training.
Back to your question about what countries are strongest. Japan is
definitely highest, in a realm of its own. Next is Germany. China,
Brazil and the US are a level below that and South Africa has been
noteworthy too.
Hard to say which countries are worst, though I'd probably say Russia
and Italy are weak for their populations. The US is disappointing
relative to its IT use, though as I said the entire certification field
is in poor shape there now.
3) On a percentage basis, I see (from your FAQ) that LPI level 1
examinations (101 and 102) greatly outnumber the LPI level 2, by about
10 to 1. Can we expect a similar trend for BSD certification? Should
we concentrate on a crafting a good entry level certification at
first? NOTE: Our survey respondents requested an exam track: an entry
level exam followed by more specialized tests.
The pyramid model is definitely in effect. The more advanced the level,
the harder it will be to made *and* the fewer people will take it. A
good foundation (entry-level) is definitely a must before building upon
that.
Whether the LPI experience will translate fully to BSD is hard to say.
Note that most people taking LPI exams are not existing Linux admins,
but people coming new into IT or switching from other OSs. Existing
admins can use their experience in the job interview, newcomers don't
have that so the cert helps establish a skill benchmark.
4) How do we "beta test" the exams?
Well, there *is* a concept of beta exams -- exams for which you can't
give out pass/fail results until you can collect a sufficient sample
size of exams taken. THEN the pass rate is established based on
psychometric analysis of the pool of exams taken, and poor exam
questions eliminated. It's actually the questions themselves that are
tested along with the collection of questions in the exam.
Remember that a good exam question is not just an accurate question. If
everyone gets a question right, or everyone gets a question wrong, it's
a bad question. The purpose of each and every question on an exam is to
separate the clueless from the clueful. Skilled people should get it
right and unskilled people should get it wrong.
5) I understand that the testing facilities use Windows computers.
Does LPI use Knoppix at commercial test centers? Is it reasonable to
hope that FreeSBIE or NetBSD Live CD's could be booted to produce a
temporary BSD environment? Do you think the test centers would allow
this?
Not at VUE or Prometric. We have no say in what they use to deliver our
exams -- ours are just part of a menu of hundreds of exams these sites
can deliver, and the test distribution/delivery systems are highly
proprietary to both companies.
We have examined the idea of doing an open source based delivery system
(and corresponding infrastructure) but that is INCREDIBLY complex and
not a high priority to LPI.
6) For small companies ( < 50 people), my perception is that the "sys
admin" is a regular employee conscripted to maintain the computers, in
addition to their regular duties. There is no full time sys admin. Can
certification be of value to these people? If they were computer
hobbyists can the certification delineate the material they need to
learn?
One could argue that the most important role of a certification is to
define what someone ought to know in order to be a good admin, even if
they never take the exam. It provides a target for book publishers,
training centres, and the self-taught. In this regard the certification
quite literally is acting as a standards body, and IMO the success of a
cert within the BSD community will be determined in significant part by
the general attitude towards standards.
Don't take standards support for granted. In my own experience I find
that open source developers can often be quite hostile about the idea of
adhering to standards that may dictate non-optimal compromises. "If you
want to read my file formats you know where the code is" is not a
standard. :-)
I'm old enough to have been a member of Usenix and gone to some of its
conferences in the mid-90s. Whenever brought up, certification was a
very controversial issue, with many people deriding the very idea of
certification as harmful and vowing to actively fight any such effort.
("I would never work for a company that demanded certification".) The
Linux community has had no such controversy, thankfully, the worst we
get is "I would never get certified myself but I can see the value for
others". This is the kind of endorsement -- of the idea of
certification, since the exams aren't complete -- I would hope the
BSDcert effort could get from people like Theo or Jordan or the CIO of
Yahoo sooner rather than later.
7) Did LPI poll CIOs, CTOs, etc, in terms of what they want from a cert?
We tried, they're very hard to reach. That's why it was good for us to
have the early support of vendors -- THEY were in contact with CIOs and
CTOs in their sales efforts, so we got that input indirectly. We early
on created an advisory council that included publishers and software
companies etc to help us with these issues.
- Evan
PS: I'm in the middle of a move from suburban Toronto closer to the
city. So if I don't answer things quickly this week don't take it
personally.
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