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Re: [seul-edu] Open Source Applications Certification



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