Re: On Certification (was Re: [GENERAL] Thought

On Sun, 3 Sep 2006, Christopher Browne wrote:

> Certification is only a profit center if you can get the price tag
> down to something reasonable.
>
> It costs on the order of $75K/year to keep an exam in place at Vue,
> which is in addition to the cost of initially building an exam, which
> means you can only make money if there are thousands of certificants.
>
> It is *expensive* to set up an exam; it only starts to become
> profitable if you're giving out tens of thousands of them per year.
>
> My understanding is that the LPI exams for Linux are only *barely*
> breaking even, and that's with a fair bit of support from IBM and
> Novell.

I'd stay FAR away from a VUE certification. Multiple choice is SO last
milinium :)

I know I'm harpring on Red Hat, but they were voted as best certification
recently. No multiple choice, only hands-on , "can you do this" with
automated tests that checks for an outcome, not how you did it.

> The only certs that I hear about that are considered of high value is
> CCNA/CCNP (Cisco).

Also completely hands on.

To run a propper cert will require some dedicated people, no you need to
pay the exhorbitant VUE fees. It will take longer to build the cert and
get enough people trained, the end quality will be higher.

Anton

--
Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past