Re: PostgreSQL Certification

Hi guys,

I've been watching this thread for the last little while and I'd like to
contribute a little of my own thoughts. In the province of Ontario if
you want to create courseware under the "Private Vocational School Act",
that's your typical IT school folks, you need to describe the conduct of
each class down to a minute by minute description. The course is vetted
and approved by the government's own education professionals who may or
may not know anything about postgres but they sure as hell know the
business of education and can recognize whether or not somebody is
competent and knows enough to be trusted and to receive government
approval, which by the way takes the form of money, lots of it i.e. in
the form of student loan funding for the educational institution to take
that course.

If the postgres community wants certification then here's one way I
believe it could be done:

1. write a text book / develop courseware
2. use the book in a local college environment
3. after running a couple of cycles of running the course then make a
formal pitch at the local govt responsible for funding of educational
institutions
4. run another couple of cycles of the course now in its sanctioned
format (you are by the way further refining the text book)
5. now create a corporate (non profit maybe) structure that takes over
and takes the necesary steps to get it into the prometric testing
infra-structure (or comptia.. whatever)
6. offer the text book as the reference for certification.

If the core development group is willing to give its blessing to the
force behind this courseware then it's just a matter of going through
the steps and not making enemies as you go through the motions. I know
of people who have already done most of these steps within their own
specialization.

Devrim GUNDUZ wrote:

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>Hi,
>
>On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Bruce Momjian wrote:
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>>How do we evaluate those classes? Is someone going to be there? We can
>>look at the printed curriculum, but do we know the instructor can answer
>>a reasonable question _not_ on the curriculum? How do we tell a company
>>we will _not_ cerify their course?
>>
>>
>
>What about certifiying the instructor first? I mean: 'PGDG Certified
>Instructors'. If I'm a PGDG Certified instructor, everyone should be sure
>that I could answare almost 'any' question about PostgreSQL.
>
>Ok, let's see the point: We are running an open-source product, that has
>no company with it. I'd prefer a class that will be certified by a company
>or Development Group. For example, there are a lot of Linux Classes in
>here; but when I feel that I need to take a certificate, I'd prefer Red
>Hat's exams. So, there may be a lot of PostgreSQL classes everywhere --but
>I'm pretty sure that people will choose a (PGDG) certified class.
>
>All you need to say is 'PGDG Certifies XX Company's Courses'; you do not
>need to announce the opposite.
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