Re: SAGE, certification, and you

[Bill Bogstad <bogstad@pobox.com>]

William LeFebvre wrote:
Dave Close wrote:
>> We have lots of certification programs already. Most of them are called 
>> college degrees.
>
>Took the words right out of my mouth.  In my personal and humble
>opinion, the best "certification" that SAGE could develop would be one
>based on college degrees.  All other professions start with some form
>of bachelor's degree, whether they eventually require separate
>certification, licensing, apprenticeships, or what have you.  Why
>not systems administration?

	Yes, a college degree is helpful for many jobs and is unlikely to hurt
much in any job.  However, what degree?  In recent reporting in the news about
the lack of skilled IT staff and the dearth of CS majors, one point which I've
seen reported (albeit rarely) is that only about 25% of people working in IT
have a CS degree.  Even if you expand to include EE, CE, and similar degrees,
I'd guess that you wouldn't find much more then 50% of working professionals
have degrees that are remotely connected with IT.  Now, I suppose that this
could mean that 50% of the people working in the field are incompetent; but my
personal experience is that the type of degree someone has is not that
strongly coorrelated with their competence with IT systems.  There are even a
fair number who have no degree at all.  I suspect that in system
administration the percentage of working professionals with non-IT related (or
no) degrees is higher; just because of the way that many people end up in
system administration.

	If SAGE is trying to really become a guild in order to boost the
prestige (and incomes) of it's current members then this may not matter.
However, I think the large group of system administrators who came to this
field via non-traditional routes will have a problem with this.  They may not
be members of SAGE yet, but I see no reason to alienate them.

				Bill Bogstad
				bogstad@pobox.com