Scott Lamberton wrote: > LPI has a responsibility to all of its certificate holders to ensure > that the certification has relevance and validity within the market.
I must have missed the consultation process being raised in this forum or elsewhere, to solicit certificate holders for their views on this issue. I had difficulty finding mention of any community consultation on the website or on the Wiki, where the recertification entry hasn't been touched since the original 2004 policy was posted (and where there's never been mention of "advice" to recertify every two years). From https://group.lpi.org/publicwiki/bin/view/Operations/RecertificationPolicy (as of today): "LPI strongly encourages certificants to recertify minimally within a ten-year period from the date the first exam of the level was passed. Since Linux is a relatively constant operating system in comparison to other systems and proprietary software programs, the ten year recertification period was determined to be most appropriate by LPI. Also, since LPI tests examinees only on vendor-neutral skills and knowledge, LPI's exams are not affected by the recurring revisions of proprietary software. Although the exam items are updated every few years to reflect new system features or kernel updates, the general scope of practice is rather constant, thus the ten year recertification period." I'm curious to know what was determined to have changed, during the consultative process, to invalidate the above paragraph -- which itself was the result of lengthy and intense debate and consultation. IIRC, this statement had been approved at the time by LPI's psychometrician, its director of exam development, the LPI Board, and NOCA. In fact, I still like the _original_ LPI approach to recertification, crafted in 1999 by Jared after much community debate: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00172.html > In our consultations with industry they have been very clear that a 10 > year (and a lifetime, even more so) certification is not keeping pace > with technological change. The 2004 policy was intended to be clear on how it might be changed. >From the Wiki entry: "possible major revisions of Linux or recommendations driven by the Linux community may lead LPI to consider shortening the recertification period." Is "consultations with industry" considered analogous to "recommendations driven by the Linux community"? > Please know that the point you raised was extensively discussed by our > Board of Directors and was made in the best interests of the > perception of value and relevancy for ALL LPI certificate holders. So existing certificate holders were indeed consulted, to solicit their interests in this policy change's relevance to them? That's good to know. It is to LPI's ongoing credit that its recertification policy -- with its modifications -- is still one of the best. Changing one's status from ACTIVE to INACTIVE -- which happens if you don't recertify -- is far superior to the practice by some certs of deleting your record as if you were never certified. A candidate can still go to employers with an "inactive" certification, and the employers can decide for themselves whether or not the certification is sufficiently valid. LPI maintains the certification record as well as the notice that it hasn't been updated, which is of value to both candidate and employer. The new change simply means that the "INACTIVE" flag is set twice as quickly as before. - Evan _______________________________________________ lpi-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss
