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A Novell Linux Specialist?
richardeholder asks: "Our Novell partners differentiate themselves in the marketplace by promoting their areas of expertise or specializations; this allows their
customers to know what their skill sets are and what they can reasonably expect these partners to provide for them.
As we embrace Linux, we would like to extend the title of 'Linux specialist' to partners who merit it. Before we move forward on this initiative, we would like to ask the Linux community for guidance on what should constitute a Linux specialist. Should we require certifications such as LPI and the RHCE/RHCT, or are there other more valuable ways of demonstrating Linux competency?"
It makes me want to re-embrace Novell just knowing that they are doing things *right* (like talking to the community on Slashdot).
I think I left off at 3.12. Hey did anyone ever keep a copy of that NCSnipes game?
Our Novell partners differentiate themselves in the marketplace by promoting their areas of expertise or specializations; this allows their customers to know what their skill sets are and what they can reasonably expect these partners to provide for them. As we embrace Linux, we would like to extend the title of 'Linux specialist' to partners who merit it. Before we move forward on this initiative, we would like to ask the Linux community for guidance on what should constitute a Linux specialist. Should we require certifications such as LPI and the RHCE/RHCT, or are there other more valuable ways of demonstrating Linux competency?
These words are the words of a suit! But that's all right, all are welcome on slashdot. Well except the RIAA and microsoft, but that's besides the point.
Basically, you need to come up with your own certification. All certifications are pretty meaningless to the non-suits, but I think your partners would have a better understanding of "skill sets" if you defined your own set of Novell Linux Specialist credentials, and then either came up with your own tests and so forth or use these credentials to certify other certifications.
one, it is nice to see novell embrace linux, provide a groupwise interface, and make linux desktop, through ximian, an option. great job. but funny thing is that at my school district, which uses netware, i've been playing nicely with novell for some time.
i had got my linux box at school (couldn't stand those damn win98 POS they give us) up and running, and used ncpmount to mount my novell share, and got our attendance and grade programs (SASI) to run through wine. now, one day our district technidiot comes into my classroom, going through his usual hardware inventory, etc., and he notices the district computer collecting dust in the corner (hell, it was a P200 i think). so, he takes a peek, and notices that i am running SASI on this weird desktop. he can't figure out how i can get linux to work with the network, how i could run sasi, how i could connect to the internet. poor fella.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Evaluate the existing certification programs: LPI and RHCE, any others out there. Look at their methodologies and tests, interview certified engineers, see what you think.
If in your opinion they're certifying wankers instead of quality engineers, you'll need to do your own certification program. The CNE was a pretty decent program IIRC.
IMHO you'll find that LPI and RHCE are pretty good programs and are probably good enough to run with or to build your own program around.
On a side note, I certainly hope Novell can make a comeback.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
There are two kinds of non-certified techs: those who are too incompetent to pass a certification, and those who are too busy actually getting things accomplished to bother with piffle like that. The certified ones tend to be the rest: the mediocre.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I don't know a single technical person who is a) reasonably good at what he does, while b) being certified as such. Said another way, all of the people I know who have a clue about any specific technology are almost certainly not the people who hold any formal certifications in that area. By and large, I don't see much evidence that the technical community in general thinks too highly of certifications. Sure, some certifications can be difficult to achieve, and can be crafted in such a way as to filter out everyone but the experts. But creating such a test would be difficult to do, and it would take a lot of time to evolve (especially something so diverse and varied as 'Linux'). And even once you get there, you still have the problem that the technical folks don't value the certification anyway.
/. is a good step towards getting useful feedback, but I think the right step would be to source a few tech heads (full-time, contract, whatever) and task them with the problem.
From what I hear in the questions posed in the original post, it sounds like there is a group of non-technical people who are searching for a way to bless some small subset of the technical crowd. I think it would be far wiser to hire some technical people to do this job for you. If you're still committed to building a certification process, get your technical people to do it for you. Posting on
How about requiring them to be a Debian maintainer? ;-)