Re: SAGE, certification, and you

[Bill Weinman <wew@bearnet.com>]

Obviously certification as a System Administrator is a mixed bag at best. 
My fear about this would be that we would end up putting more monetary 
value on the people who have passed a test than the people who can actually 
do what they were hired to do. 

As a well-respected voice in many technical disciplines, with no formal 
education past the 6th grade and no certifications of any sort, I can tell 
you with first-hand authority that a person's value and abilities have 
little to do with what courses or tests they have passed. Any efforts to 
pre-qualify human beings by testing their knowledge and abilities in a 
forced artificial environment will be counter productive at best, and 
reward inverse abilities at worst. 

Instead, we should encourage prospective employers to actually check 
references and talk to former colleagues to get a good idea of the 
value of a prospective employee. That's the only real test anyway. 

The only way to know if someone can do it is to let them try. The ability 
to learn new skills is probably the most important qualification for 
our profession. 

###

Interesting side-note: I took a look at the certification materials for 
the MSCE course in TCP/IP recently. I was appalled! I would fail that 
test miserably, since I don't know the names of the Microsoft TCP/IP tools. 
But I've been managing TCP/IP networks since most of the engineers who 
wrote those tools were in diapers! 

Let's not repeat the mistakes made by MS and Novell.

--Bill



+--     Bill Weinman <http://www.weinman.com/wew/> is the author of    ---+
       several books <http://www.weinman.com/wew/books.html> and is 
     co-founder of WebMonster(tm) Networks <http://www.webmonster.net/> 
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