Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 23:16:07 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "David Caldwell" <dns@knology.net>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Certification Message-ID: <000401c10450$cfb7ab60$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <AHEPKFNCLEMEPHJEADDGEEEFCAAA.dns@knology.net>
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I'd like to start a discussion about this topic as I've been pondering a few questions related to this myself. To start with it's been my observation that certifications are desired for one of 3 general reasons: a) Employment: employers want people to have them to make it easier to weed out a flood of applicants, candidates want them to be able to apply for certain jobs. b) Personal Pride: people want the certification so they can make their pedegree look bigger, have one more certificate on the wall, etc. c) Education: Students hope getting the certification will help them learn about the thing they want to get certified on. Now, I would speculate that for BSD, reason number 1 is nonexistent, and for reason number 2 the type of people that want another notch aren't going to be the type that want it from BSD. That leaves reason number 3, the education part. Now, there's some certification programs that do a fairly good job of the education part, the Cisco CNE is probably one. Most though are not aimed at educating, instead they are political. (note that this has nothing to do with how "hard" the certification is to get) For example, the MCSE from Microsoft is most definitely not about education (apologies to the MCSE's in the crowd here) as the materials I've reviewed on MCSE's are rather outdated when it comes to the networking part in particular. For example they only even started discussing classless IP addressing last year in the official MCSE curriculum. That certification is more about Microsoft being able to use the fact that it has a certification as a marketing plus to sell more Windows. I still do have respect for the folks that get it but mainly respect at the fact that they went to the trouble and completed it, not that I thought it was particularly hard for most of them to get. Even the Cisco CNA is like this, it teaches little and is mainly there to teach people what a router looks like, it's more about advertising the Cisco name than anything else. With FreeBSD, there is no central company with an axe to grind to see the world filled with CFE's (Certified FreeBSD Engineers? ;-)) so your not going to see the funding from anyone for a "vanity" or "marketing" CFE certification program. Instead, any certification program that anyone puts together is going to have to be aimed at reason number 3 - the education part. At least, that's the reasoning that I keep coming up with. Now, once a CFE program DOES exist and has critical mass, why then certainly it would be able to address reasons number 1 and 2 as well as marketing/political reasons. But to get there a certification program would need to start out shooting for reason number 3. So, now we have kind of a "were we need to be at" premise, you next need to address the issue of accreditation. All accreditation really is, boiled down, is a blessing by someone who everyone agrees is _the_ authority on the topic. An unaccredited certification program is worthless. You see these all the time - for example our local community college has loads of "certifications" they will issue in Computer Information Technology but nothing in that program is transferrable to anything else because none of it is accredited. They ALSO have real, live CompSci courses that ARE accredited and thus can be transferred. With the vendor-certifications, like the CNE and the MCSE, the vendors themselves do the accreditation, or at least are supposed to. With FreeBSD, once again the lack of a single central authority on the project means that a vendor of a FreeBSD certification program is not going to be able to get accreditation on any kind of CFE program. In short, _who_ out there is _the_ authority that can say whether some vendor's FreeBSD certification program is good or not? There's lots of people out there, even myself, who could _write_ a FreeBSD curriculum and certification program. But without a single FreeBSD body to bless it, it seems to me that it's worthless. for example, if New Horizons hired someone like me to write a FreeBSD certification program, how would you as a student be able to trust that the information the program is teaching is even correct? Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of David Caldwell >Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 9:34 PM >To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Certification > > >Is there a certification program for any of the BSD Unixes? > >I have seen them for Linux and for Sun Solaris, as well as the >various other >flavors of Unix. Will there be or is there one for BSD? > >David Caldwell >dns at knology dot net > > >To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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