Re: Certification

Ah, the old "certification" fallacy!

Certifications, like degrees, only tell hiring managers and recruiters the certification holder has passed a set of requirements and/or tests, which may or may not be available or even comprehensible to the interested party. They say nothing about work ethic, native intelligence, ability to work and play well with others, ingenuity, broader knowledge base, or effectiveness. Consequently I have found them useless in making hiring decisions (although those were Oracle DBAs) and suspect the certification process was being promoted as a necessity to sell more training courses.

I know EnterpriseDB and CertFirst provide certification programs. A quick Google search shows this effort has been attempted before by SRA. I do not know the quality of these programs.

I, for one, am more likely to ask if someone has read Greg Smith's book ("Who's Greg Smith?" - out at first), which mailing lists they are follow and how often ("What mailing list?" - out at second), or what is their favorite feature in PostgreSQL ("Joins!" - out at third). I am more interested in in their knowhow and interest in expanding their skills then a mere certification.

However, for those who live in that sad world where certifications are a minimum entry level requirement, a certification created by community consensus makes sense, so long as the criteria for certification are open and public.

Note: The opinions above are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect any official position of AWeber, its management, or employees.

Bob Lunney
Senior Database Engineer
AWeber Communications, LLC
1100 Manor Drive
Chalfont, PA 18914 USA

> On Oct 29, 2015, at 5:43 AM, Michael Meskes <meskes(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> as you may already know roughly a year ago the Linux Foundation has started
> offering vendor neutral and even distribution agnostic certifications for
> Linux sysadmins and engineers
> (https://training.linuxfoundation.org/certification) I mentioned to them
> that in my opinion this is something that the PostgreSQL world would need as
> well and they expressed an interest in developing one. But they don't want to
> do it without community involvement.
>
> Therefore I'd like to assemble a group here that has an interest in this topic
> to discuss and figure out the details. Who'd be interested?
>
> Also, since this may result in us taking about content, I think we should
> create a dedicated and non-public mailing list for it. Or else it might not be
> worth the effort. How would this actually be handled?
>
> One core member already expressed an interest so I guess the information flow
> will not be a problem.
>
> Michael
> --
> Michael Meskes
> Michael at Fam-Meskes dot De, Michael at Meskes dot (De|Com|Net|Org)
> Meskes at (Debian|Postgresql) dot Org
> Jabber: michael.meskes at gmail dot com
> VfL Borussia! Força Barça! Go SF 49ers! Use Debian GNU/Linux, PostgreSQL
>
>
>
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