[Linux-aus] LA Certification

[John Dalton]

On Tue, Jul 4, 2023 at 9:30 PM Paul Gear via linux-aus <
linux-aus at lists.linux.org.au> wrote:

>
> In my experience, certs don't teach you the skills; they are merely
> validations of your existing skills.  If you come to study for a cert
> with no prior experience with the technology, you should learn some
> skills as you study, but but if you're already a good problem solver,
> they probably won't teach you much at all. As such, on a job application
> they don't really mean that much as an indicator, either positive or
> negative.  (It's that latter part that made me wade into this thread -
> the idea that they might somehow be seen as a contra-indicator or
> antipattern for a job applicant is rather troubling.)
>

I agree with what you say about learning from certs, and while I won't put
words into anyone else's mouth I will say for myself that it's only certs
in the *absence* of other indicators that are a slight red flag - more of a
mildly raised eyebrow - for me. There's no doubt some bias on display there
- historically there have been certs I did not respect due to them
seemingly being awarded to any warm body regardless of whether or not they
could do the most basic things. If I don't know anything about the cert in
question, it's meaningless to me.

If I see that someone has achieved a bunch of certs but has *no other
example* of their work or efforts to be able to point to, then having a
bunch of certs just tells me they may have wasted their time (and possibly
money) working on the wrong things. That might not be their fault -
different education systems/communities/cultures/etc sometimes mislead
people (in my opinion) about what is valued by people assessing whether or
not someone might be good at doing a job.

Having them won't count against you, unless it's *all* you have. In that
case we are probably talking about purely entry level roles, where you'll
probably want to do your own assessment of whether someone has any basic
troubleshooting skills, which might be as simple as a conversation.

As for the original topic, my own two cents are that it's a tremendous
amount of effort and not worth our time and resources to develop and
maintain a certification program. Perhaps a better approach would be for us
as a community to talk more about how folks can explore and learn, where to
dig deeper into topics only touched on in certs, or even to go so far as to
endorse particular certs issued by other bodies which we think are
worthwhile.

J.

-- 
http://johndalton.info
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnrdalton
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