Category: Editorial

This is part 3 of a 3 part series of thoughts on certification and Microsoft technologies.

We’ll never be able to completely and accurately measure a person’s skills in technology. At least not in any cost- and time-effective way. Ultimately we want to come up with some way to weed through candidates and ensure they have a minimum aptitude for technology and some level of skill in the areas that are important to us. We want a way, with some level of confidence, to say that a person who has xx certification knows yy skills.

In the Microsoft world we can be sure that our platforms and technologies will change at least every 2-3 years, with major or minor revisions to all parts of the product we use. We might see minor tool changes, but fundamental feature enhancements or vice versa.  However even when there are major changes, the revisions to the effective way we accomplish tasks doesn’t change much. It evolves, and I think that a core set of skills can be measured, and more importantly, scored.

How we do that, I’m not sure. As Brent Ozar said, however, the experiment must go on. We, as an industry and group, should be finding ways to assess our community, and drive forward our profession. I’d like to think that we could build an open source framework that allows for the presentation of a situation, and the evaluation of a result. It could be a framework like tsqlt, which allows us to write tests that can be evaluated by a scoring system. By taking a script of some sort, and comparing it to a “question”, some automated measurement would be able to determine if the question was answered (or partially answered).

Our community could easily build a bank of hundreds, if not thousands, of questions. Want to evaluate someone? Download 50 questions, drop someone in a room for an hour and see how much they get done. They might not finish, which would be a good test in and of itself. Run their answers through a scoring engine and get a report back. With tags, we could easily separate questions into a variety of packs that employers could use to test certain areas. Testing core skills, without too much worry about version specific items would allow questions to live for years. Heck, with the age of some SQL Server instances out here, I bet some companies still need SQL Server 2000 based tests.

Ultimately I don’t think Microsoft will properly build and maintain a framework to evaluate candidates. They have too much incentive to cheat. They can fool lots of employers with easy to pass, paper diplomas and turn a profit with lots of easy certifications that sound good, but don’t really test skills. The future of measurement in technology will be like it is in many other fields, with independent bodies that provide a minimal level of educational skill for most individuals. It will consist of granular tests that measure skills, in real situations, not question and answer trivia. Some people will slip through, some will cheat, but it will work well enough when it falls out of the hands of vendors.

Until that time, all you can do is prove your own skills, in person, through your publications, or with lots of good, valuable answers given to others.

Steve Jones

Video and Audio versions Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com. Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements. Windows Media Video ( 25.9MB)  MP4 iPod Video ( 29.5MB)  MP3 Audio ( 6.0MB)  Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio To submit an article, rant or editorial, log in to the Contribution Center

This is part 2 of a 3 part series of thoughts on certification and Microsoft technologies.

The idea of certifying someone as having a skill is almost as old as the idea of teaching someone a skill. I’m sure as soon as a person had the idea of teaching someone for compensation, others wanted some assurance that the person had learned the skill. That was probably the first time that a test was developed, graded, and scores passed out.

We all know that a certificate or a test score doesn’t imply any level of competence at a skill. If I had to weld two pieces of metal together as a test, successfully completeing this wouldn’t imply that I could weld any two other pieces of the same metal together (size, scale, etc. matter). It wouldn’t even imply that I’d do as good a job welding the 99th and 100th pieces together in a week as I’d done during the test. The same would hold true in almost any endeavor, but we still have tests, grades, certifications, diplomas, and awards in many different fields.

Is IT that different? In one sense it is. The technology field seems to change so often, and the bars for entry (and thus hiring) are so low that it’s difficult to set up standardized tests, often because it’s not cost effective. Medicine and law change constantly, but their tests slowly evolve, and they certainly don’t change at the rate of SQL Server versions and tests. It’s also more cost effective to create new revisions of tests in these other fields when the candidates have made a large investment in their education and regulatory agencies require licenses to practice in these other fields.

However I might argue that technology doesn’t change that much. The idea of backing up a SQL Server database, rebuilding a clustered index, adding a login, querying for duplicates, and more haven’t changed much in the two decades I’ve worked with the product. The actual syntax might be different, but are we hiring people that remember syntax or accomplish tasks?

I think that’s the point of certification. It should be a method that gives others confidence that an individual can accomplish a task, or has some basic skill. I’d argue the current set of tests, questions, and even structure of the MCSE/MCITPro/MCSA whatever doesn’t remotely do that. It doesn’t test skills, tests knowledge at the base level of memorization, and fails to provide a basic bar that we can be sure everyone has met.

Perhaps those aren’t Microsoft’s goals. Perhaps they value their profits higher than the certification that individuals hold skills, perhaps they view these designations as a part of their marketing effort to sell software. Perhaps they have other goals. All I know is that as long as employers ask for these certifications in job postings, as long as employers pay for tests and candidates take them, why should Microsoft change?

If we all believe the emperor has clothes, does it matter if he really wears any?

Steve Jones

Video and Audio versions Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com. Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements. Windows Media Video ( 22.8MB)  MP4 iPod Video ( 26.2MB)  MP3 Audio ( 5.3MB)  Feeds are available at iTunes and Mevio To submit an article, rant or editorial, log in to the Contribution Center