On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
I would take the viewpoint of the opposite. I would continue to let the vendors/organizations certify as they see fit. In fact, one training vendor has excelled at this: Prosoft Training -- known for their Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) program. While I think the CIW exams themselves _suck_hard_ (very ambiguous on-purpose, although they are easy to pass if you know "how to counter" them), but their partnership with Sybex has produced excellent courseware.
I would submit that if the test is more about how to take it than a measure of knowledge then they are not really meeting the need.
Prosoft Training already offers an Apache (along with IIS) focus in its various CIW tracks. Prosoft Training also offers a Perl testing (along with Java) in its various CIW tracks. This includes a general database exam too. They have certainly accomodated with many other organizations before, including CompTIA, Cisco, IBM, Novell, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun, etc... They would be an ideal candidate to propose this too.
The Perl people I spoke with (a well known person in those ranks) was not impressed with the present offerings and suggested directly that LPI was a good venue to make a well respected certification. I don't know about other areas but my exposure to Perl shows me that making a programmers certification that is respected will be difficult but well worth the effort if it can be done right. Of course doing it wrong will hurt immensely.
Now for the other pieces ...
MySQL AB has introduced MySQL certifications.
Given the limited resources of LPI, I would limit any considerations to fostering an inter-entity partnership if LPI would take this up. Leveraging existing CIW exams, plus LPI and MySQL AB exams with more detailed focus on Linux and MySQL testing, respectively, this would be a great cross-track.
Partnering with the right entities would be great. I'd be careful however. The CIW tests being involved with "gaming the test" might hurt our reputation. I don't know anything about the MySQL test but the organization is well respected so looking into that might be helpful.
In fact, I'd pitch it to CIW and let them run with it. It could only help advocate more LPI exam takers. At least if and when LPI has the resources to tackle new level 3 exam electives for Apache, databases, etc...
I'd like to see some dicussion on how LPI feels about partnerships and just what kinds of things are best left to partners and which are best brought in to the core of LPI.
Just a suggestion
That is where things get started!
Mark Miller Exam Devel Lead Level 1 _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
