Re: SAGE, certification, and you

["Tina M. Darmohray" <tina@systemexperts.com>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 1998 at 08:53:10PM +2230, Pat Wilson wrote:
> 
> 
> Listen up, folks - this is important!
> 
> During our January meeting, the SAGE Board did its annual planning and
> goal-setting exercise.  Often, nothing earth-shattering occurs.  This time,
> however, we took the Certification bull by the horns and have made a Plan.
> 
> We kept coming back to the mission statement phrase "advancement of systems
> administration as a profession" and what that implies.  After a rather
> vociferous debate we agreed (some more cheerfully than others) that a
> "profession" entails certification - careers without such things are
> generally referred to as "trades" (think of the difference between 
> MDs and morticians, for example).

I've never hired anyone because they had a certificate in anything.
Education and experience is why you hire someone.  Sometimes the
education comes first, sometimes it is part of the experience,
usually it is ongoing.

I don't believe SAGE members, or the SA profession, would be best
served by SAGE/USENIX spending their resources generating, and
administering?, certifications, merit badges, or any other 
SAGE-unique way of naming education and experience.  Rather, I think
the limited resources should be focused on high-leverage areas,
where we're not providing infrastructure, just building on it.
To me, that means we work with existing educational organizations
to get "sysadmin" courses, majors, AA programs, even certificates!,
etc. in place.  We don't reinvent the infrastructure and we don't 
rename what we want: system administrators with education, 
experience, or both.

In any case, I'd argue that you can't certify or merit anyone who
doesn't qualify because they don't have the knowledge.  -- Let's
put the cart back behind the horse and figure out some ways to
educate.  If we accomplish that, we could *always* revisit
"certification".

	Tina