On Thu, 27 Jan 2000, Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> I suspect that the difference here highlights two fundamentally
> opposed ways of thinking about what Level III is. Either it is "top
> tier admin certification" or it is "for folks who want to specialize".
>
> We have to decide which of those Level III will be, for useful
> discussion of what to include/exclude from Level II to be possible at
> all.
>
> Who is expected to attempt Level III LPI certification? Is it for
>
> (a) folk who want to specialize, that is, demonstrate a few special
> skills within the Linux admin universe
>
> or is it
>
> (b) experienced corporate level admins who want to attest to their
> overall high skill and knowledge levels at dealing with complex or
> large scale "enterprise-level" system administration, as a whole
>
> I don't know the answer. But until there *is* one, it is going to be
> very hard to sensibly discuss what to include in (or exclude from)
> Level II.
>
> Could someone (anyone) clarify this, please?
Yes. We have been working with option a); please see our overall
program page, http://www.lpi.org/c-process.html . This choice was made
almost a year ago, IIRC, for these reasons:
- it is hybris to assume we are qualified to test and certify
corporate-level senior sysadmins (using remote multiple-choice exams),
even assuming they would like to get certified.
- being both general and advanced (= deep knowledge) means we need to
cover an awful lot of material, that probably won't fit into a few exams
anyway. Also, few people can be both generalists and experts with deep
knowledge. So we tentatively chose to offer people certification in
selected specialist topics at expert level. Specialist and expert in the
conventional meaning from the real world (= someone who knows a lot about
a certain topic); not in the perverted meaning of borg IT consultants,
marketing and sales (= someone who knows something about only 1 thing).
Now this basic choice may be reconsidered, but then a very good case
must be put forward to challenge the considerations above. Speak now
or rest your peace forever, and lets go on with the model we've been
working with.
In this model, as Scott Murray and Chuck Mead have already pointed out,
Level 2 is the last general level and should contain all things that every
system|network administrator|engineer needs to know, but not things of
interest to only a limited number of people.
Furthermore, as Alan Mead pointed out, at this stage we must not carried
away in detailed discussions about what needs to be included.
a) First, we need a decent description of the kind of job we want to
certify.
b) Based on that, we collect all relevant tasks we can think of, as well
as some that are borderline or high-level.
c) Then we get massive expert opinion about the actual relevance and level
of expertise of all these tasks.
d) From the analysis of this survey, we get the real detailed job
description, as Alan pointed out. At this stage it will become clear
what a L2 sysadmin should do with, for example, RAID.
I hope this will help focussing the discussion,
--
Tom Peters
Secretary & Exam Development Specialist,
Linux Professional Institute
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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