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A Novell Linux Specialist?

Posted by Cliff on from the proving-you-know-what-you-know dept.

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?"

3 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Wow, high ranking Novell official honors Slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  2. this man is not one of us by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. forget certifications for now, use real people by kaan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    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 /. 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.