Paul Graydon wrote:
Yes I'm serious, they were CCNP qualified, hired as a NOC engineer for
an ISP & Hosting company. For the company the NOC team was the top tier
of customer support (3rd line+), they looked after routers, switches,
firewalls, servers, leased lines, and so on.
This individual was perfectly capable of regurgitating all the facts,
figures and technical details you can imagine, probably pretty much the
entire CCNP syllabus. What they didn't seem that capable of was
actually applying that to anything. I'd bet good money that if I'd
asked him at the time what the 1918 network ranges are he'd have been
able to tell me.
This is exactly what we're teaching kids to do these days (makes me feel
so old that I've already been saying this for several years and I'm only
31) standardised tests aren't marked based on ability to apply
knowledge, just the knowledge itself. Hence my view, give me someone
who knows how to think over someone who is qualified to the hilt. These
exam cram 'do a CCNP in a week' courses only serve to make it worse.
Paul
Ahh, I get you now...thanks.
Took me back to '64 and the battery of tests (all day!) I was given before getting hired by IBM for the 360 rollout. I
was amazed by the amount of questions of the "if gear a turns ccw, what does lever b do?" variety.
Later I was told that -all- the testing results were important, even the psychological ones, but what they really wanted
to find was the best analytical *mind*.
Best,
--Michael
