[Linux-aus] Professional associations VS boards of registration VS Accreditation and certification

[Paul TBBle Hampson]

That was an absolutely fascinating piece of back-and-forth regarding
the ACS and the other goings on, thankyou to all participants for
what was a fascinating read.

That said, and in an attempt to try and wrap my head around all this
stuff, I post the following for flaming^W discussion:


A professional assocation (eg. Master Builder's Assocation [1]) is something
you join.  They have some kind of financial entry barrier, and some kind
of professional or educational barrier (which may or may not be
administered by them)

They provide "professional" benefits, ie. benefits directly targetted
at those acting as professionals in the field. Things like insurance
focussing (as per that Law Council of Australia PDF), gold cards,
letters to stick after your name etc.

Membership of a professional organisation is presumably an indication
that you have achieved a certain level within your profession that it
makes sense for you to outlay money for those sort of benefits.


On the other hand, you have certifications and acceditations.  These say
less about one's professionalism, and more about one's training and
knowledge and experience. This is a fairly broad category ranging from
your industry-driven and domain-specific MCSE, LPI, CCNE and A+-types
through to your post-graduate research doctorates. Although diverse, I
lump them here together to keep them distinct from the above and the
below, intertwined as they may become.

And intertwined they do indeed become, as they are often the mortar
in the barriers to entry. Their sheer variety makes them probably
the hardest for the non-industry-knowledgable other to use when
making determinations about someone's professional standing, while
within the industry I have a fairly good idea of what to expect from
an MCSE, an A+ or a B.IT graduate.

This opacity for the lay-person is one of the reasons you get a
professional membership, because there's much fewer such organisations
a lay-person needs to concern themselves with to achieve due diligence.

I'll digress here and say that the argument that in a generation
everyone will be knowledgeable enough to be able to distinguish Uncle
Harry's 19-year-old nephew from the professional, motivated 19-year-old
TAFE graduate (Uncle Harry's other nephew, on his partner's side) is
fairly bogus, IMHO. We've had automobiles longer than we've had me
around, and I can't tell a good mechanic from a dodgey one nine times
out of ten until after the work's done. And with my history of
dodgey-car ownership, I've met a fair few mechanics in my time. And it's
not that I'm not knowledgeable about cars...


On the gripping hand, you have boards of registration, such as the
Builder's Registration Board of Western Australia [3]. They are usually
government-recognised bodies where all those acting professionally
within a profession are expected to register, and which may or may not
be compulsary to register with. (For various definitions of compulsary).
The entry barriers to these should by-and-large be only
professional/educational in nature, not financial.

The thing a board of registration provides is a sort of one-stop shop
for doing professional background checks on potential business
partners/employees. They would be the ones you complain to if a
perported professional acts unethically or unprofessionally, such as is
indicated by [4], with the expectation that an investigation would be
undertaken, and records kept.

A board of registration provides a certain legitimacy to your
professionalism. It displays a willingness to be public in your claim
to being a professional in the field, and you willingness to have your
actions placed under scrutiny.

Not all industries require boards of registration, just those which the
consumer must be able to use without having directly knowledge of the
industry itself. (Maybe that _is_ all industries? It's certainly us...)


Anyway, the point I'm leading up to is that what I think we need is
a board of registration. I think it would operate something like this:

Registration would not be compulsory. When you do register, you are
effectively saying "I am a professional IT worker, and I wish to be
recognised as such". Registration would have some entry barrier, but
it would be a nice, low one. (ie. a relevant degree, accreditation or
certification, Debian Developership, send in your resume showing your
five years at Oracle in file systems-based storage, etc.).

The terms under which professionalism is established would be part of
the public record, as would current registration status. Relevant
summary details of any investigations which turned out to be founded
should probably be available to the public too, in some form or other.

The board of registration would be recognised by the government and all
the relevant professional associations as the single point of
registration for IT professionals in whatever region it was operated
under (most of the registration boards that come to mind are based at
the state level) and registration would generally be a requisite for
membership of such professional organisations

Although registration would not be compulsary, I expect that it wouldn't
take long before most IT service providers were expected to have someone
who was a registered IT professional involved in the service provision,
and that person's professional reputation would be the one carrying the
risk, if not the whole organisation being a registered professional
organisation.

Membership of the board of registration should _not_ be onorous to
maintain, and should basically involve keeping one's professionalism up
(ie. if you go and work as a brickie for ten years, you might have to
redemonstrate your IT professionalism?) and not getting deregistered for
acting unprofessionally.

I expect such a board of registration would _not_ be a forum for members
to take positions on government policy, future directions in IT or
anything of the sort. It should be something that looks a lot like a
three-table relational database, and people to add, and retreive data
from it.


You might ask at this point, what does all this have to do with FOSS?
Not a lot. FOSS is a valid methodology, if your professional
organisations, certifications and board of registration get in the way
of FOSS in any way (or for that matter in the way of non-FOSS) then
they're doing it very badly wrong. (Well, not counting industry-driven
certification marketing as a means of building a professional base
behind a certain set of products or services)

What does it have to do with Linux Australia? More, thankfully.  I think
we're a community assocation, not a professional assocation... [5] We do
have aspects of a professional assocation, but we don't actually have
any of the barriers to entry. What we _do_ happen to have is a nice
concentration of professionals who may happen to have certifications
that, just an example out of thin air, the ACS happen to not recognise.
I daresay that puts us in a good position to help with the
identification and assessment of registrations with the above-posited
board of registration.

Slightly more generally, the community assocations in a particular
area are well suited to spotting the professionals in an area who don't
happen to have stamped pieces of paper with "professional" written on
them.


(Sorry for the builder-type examples. It was the first type of industry
that I managed to google for that had a nice, clear-cut distinction
between registration board and professional association)

[1] http://www.masterbuilders.com.au/
[2] http://www.brb.org.au/apply.htm#individual
[3] http://www.brb.org.au/
[4] http://content.ytmnd.com/content/a/2/2/a224551a525ebf5e30cedf1f4ae16b99.gif
I've been waiting nearly two days to write an appropriate email to use
this little gem...
[5] That's a different thread...

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------
Paul "TBBle" Hampson, B.Sc, LPI, MCSE
On-hiatus Asian Studies student, ANU
The Boss, Bubblesworth Pty Ltd (ABN: 51 095 284 361)
Paul.Hampson at Pobox.Com

Of course Pacman didn't influence us as kids. If it did,
we'd be running around in darkened rooms, popping pills and
listening to repetitive music.
 -- Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc, 1989

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.1/au/
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