Re: [seul-edu] Open Source Applications Certification

[Evan Leibovitch <evan@lpi.org>]

Randy Edwards wrote:
>    This point hit home hard.
>
> > students in the door.  What concerns me is that "certification-mania" is
> > starting to be seen as a substitution for an education, and that's 
> > just sad.
>    I agree wholeheartedly.  It's sad that someone with a stamp from a 
> certification agency is worth more than someone with a compsci 
> bachelor's.  To me, a certification makes sense for some sort of highly 
> specialized work (e.g. security) but for general system administration 
> or programming, it's a poor excuse for a real education.
Maybe we're dreaming, but we like to think that LPI is a couple of 
notches above most typical IT certifications. Some notable differences:

- LPI does not expire its certifications. While we encourage people to 
keep their knowledge current, we will never force the issue by revoking 
certs that were legitimately obtained. We believe that the practise of 
expiring IT certifications is done more to sell products than further 
education.

- LPI is vendor-independent and training-method-independent. That is, we
explicitly separate training from certification -- we don't make an
official curriculum and never will. We post our objectives on our 
website so that anyone can create a course, write a book, or just study 
on their own. We don't care how people prepare for LPI exams so long as 
they know their stuff when they come in. And we try hard to make the 
exams challenging so that passing them *does* indicate some real 
knowledge -- currently, about 57% of the people who take LPI exams do 
not pass them.

- LPI is heavily decentralized to ensure that the cert is relevant and
accessible worldwide. Local groups in many countries have started LPI
affiliate groups to promote LPI and Linux education in general.

- LPI is working to be the first IT certification to be accredited by 
the National Commission for Certifying Agencies (NCCA) 
(http://www.noca.org/ncca/ncca.htm). As a non-profit peer-review body 
LPI has few equivalents in the IT world.

As a community-bred body we are sensitive to the usual complaints 
against certification. We work hard to educate the HR world that 
certification is part of a balanced breakfast and is no substitute for a 
good interview or reference cheching. However, when used properly as 
intended IT certification *does* help -- not only in hiring practises, 
but also in removing a prime objection to the implementation of Linux in 
commercial IT.

If there are suggestions about how to improve LPI's program I would love 
to hear them. We are nothing without being responsive to our community.

- Evan