Re: SAGE, certification, and you

["Ruth Milner [VLA]" <rmilner@NRAO.EDU>]

Good to see some active discussion on the general list about this topic!

I am another one who is not particularly in favor of certification,
but first I would like to focus on a couple of key points raised by other
respondents, which I would not want to see buried. :-)

Hal Pomeranz wrote:
> Would the SAGE Board be willing to publish the complete results 
> of the survey?

IMHO, the results *must* be made available to SAGE members, and I assume
that this would have happened sooner or later anyway; there is no reason
I can think of why they should not be. Is there an ETA for a WWW page
with this information, like, say, the one with the LISA survey results?

Elizabeth Zwicky wrote:

> Exactly what is that plan?  As in, what are its goals, its timelines,
> and the people who're carrying it out?

These are critical questions.

Could the Board please respond to these issues?

To add my own comments:

Pat Wilson (on behalf of the SAGE Board) wrote:

> a "profession" entails certification - careers without such things are
> generally referred to as "trades"

Assuming this is really the case (which I'm by no means convinced of),
so what?

Elizabeth made some excellent points about the level of training
and apprenticeship required for other fields where some form of
certification is required. (The original analogy of MD versus
mortician seems to have turned out not to illustrate the desired
point. :-) ) Certification without such education is premature
to say the least. If SAGE wants to "advanc[e] system administra-
tion as a profession" by creating a certification process, then
the plan has to include establishing such training and apprentice-
ship programs. Does it?

Pat> it's possible to have certification without it being
Pat> mandatory [...] However, somewhere along the line, that question
Pat> will resurface.

If certification is to be meaningful, it must ultimately be required
in order to practice that profession. I don't believe that anything
less would carry any serious weight with anyone. I also don't believe
that SAGE can enforce such requirements even among its membership,
much less the thousands of sysadmins who have never heard of us.
Again, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Ruth.
----
Ruth Milner                            NRAO                  Socorro NM
Manager of Computing Systems    rmilner@aoc.nrao.edu