Associations, accreditation and certification: life-long learning, money spinner or bringing clarrification to the market?

Maria has been blogging on accreditation for Business Analysts. I know that there’s been discussion amongst the different disciplines of web development for years regarding professional associations, accreditation, and certification. A lot of it has been about trying to define what we do, clarifying and differentiation the different roles within web development, and determining measures for what constitutes a good practitioner and a mediocre one. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about accreditation and certification that is purely academic — a search for identity amongst a wide range of other analyst fields. Some of it is political — the fight control for dominance amongst peers in the community’s space. I’ve also seen that a lot of it is about business and making money.

What ever the motivation, does this bring any real clarification to the market? Does it enable us or our clients to differentiate between the poor practitioners and the good ones?

Let’s take Microsoft Certification as an example. IDC studies [1] into their programme yielded the following statistics:

• Certification improves project delivery and deployment – IT organizations with at least 25 percent Microsoft Certified staff had a 15 percent increase in projects deployed on time and within budget
• Organizations that have Microsoft Certified staff, reduce unscheduled downtime by 18%

On this issue, Don Spencer of the Waterloo-Wellington IT Pro User Group notes that certification (old and new) was useful for entry-level positions because it reduced the risk of hiring unqualified newcomers. Lack of certification, for seasoned professionals, stands in the way of securing any alternative job opportunity.

Jennifer Waters has been the manager of the CPLS (Certified Partners for Learning Solutions) channel and the Learning and Certification program for Microsoft in in Canada for the past 4 years. She believes in certification [2]:

…remember university, high school? Remember studying for exams? There were a ton of facts that you memorized but don’t remember any more. What all that studying gave you was broad knowledge. You might not remember the dates of WW II but you probably know what underlying factors triggered the start of it.

Certification is the same thing. There are definitely questions in the exams that rarely come up in real life, but it gives you a foundation to leap from. If you’ve got a ton of experience, it updates you and jogs your memory. Some of those out of the ordinary facts just might come up one day and if you are certified you’ll be the hero that solved them instead of that shmuck that you have to work with.

Jennifer’s suggestion here is that certification is about learning and not about giving clarity to the market — I think I’m ok with this idea. But this notion fails when we see certifications like ITIL evolving, changing, bringing with it the fear of rendering previous certifications redundant [3]. The business machine behind many of the programmes of certification decide, as time goes by, that what you’ve learned last time now requires a new piece of paper and several thousand dollars to confirm its relevance, and then proclaims this for all to hear — from practitioners to clients. Ultimately, this is more about political control and standardisation than it is about learning, and has little to do with educating clients about what is a good practitioner and a bad one. It’s like suggesting that Windows Vista is better than Windows XP because Vista is newer.

A university degree, however, aims to teach the fundamental theories and approaches that can be universally applied. When formal learning is complete, most university graduates then keep abreast of movements in their fields of expertise through channels like journals and research, and it becomes very obvious, very quickly, to other professionals, when they don’t. Here, the emphasis is on life-long learning and not pieces of paper.

I guess, all-in-all, this means that associations, accreditation and certification, attempt to be about life-long learning but because of the nature of commercialism probably end up being about money and only result in control of the market rather than bringing clarification. To this all I can say is ‘poor client’ to those who are fooled into thinking that a piece of paper with ‘version 3′ stamped on it has any real value, and ‘poor professional’ to those who have to pay $1,000 for it. I think I’ll stick to spending $10,000+ for a post-grad degree every 10 years or so for the learning it gives me.

M
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[1] IDC Study on Certification, 2003

[2] Waters, J. (2007). Does Certification Really Matter Any More? Technet Blogs, Monday, March 26. Online at: http://blogs.technet.com…matter-really-any-more.aspx

[3] The ITIL Imp (2006). ITIL Refresh v3 – Update, 10 October. http://itilimp.blogspo…v3-update.html