Preparing to Consider Certification

by Bryan McDonald
<[email protected]>

Bryan McDonald is a program manager at GNAC, where he leads consulting teams on systems, networks, and security projects for a variety of customers.

SAGE had many goals in the early days, probably as many as there were people interested in participating in its formation. Even then, certification evoked the most passion in us all, both those for and those against it. It seemed so right that an organization founded to advance the "profession" of system administration should take this issue on and do it "now." Then, as now, lots of vendors were already offering certification courses, which fueled the sense of urgency.

Unfortunately, the fact that certification courses were springing up in various vendor arenas, and even in training schools, has hurt the certification debate rather than clarified it. It is easy to react to their presence, to dismiss the bad ones, yet mistrust the trend and feel anxious about its impact on our jobs. It is easy to decide that SAGE needs to drive a better program, one that truly defines who we are and the value we bring to our employers and communities. It is hard, however, to define the value. Many arguments involve the very core definitions of what we do: Is designing ATM networks the same as installing user accounts? Is editing the registry the same as editing the resolv.conf file? Is managing a few machines for some Ph.D.s in a faraday cage the same as managing the backbone for a 100,000-node network? In many ways, we aren't even sure yet what it is we are certifying, so how can we certify it?

In the early days of medicine, doctors cared for small communities of people, learning about their strengths and weaknesses, understanding the foods, the environment, and the hardships of their lives. They cared for the whole community, from birth to death, and they trained each following generation as best they could, passing on a bit more information than their teachers had. Eventually the communities got larger, the cures got more complicated, and the village doctors began learning about the medicines and cures from other villages. When the task of passing on this knowledge got to be too great for one person to accomplish, the doctors gathered and formed organizations dedicated to learning more and to teaching more to the next generation. Long before the AMA came into existence, schools and universities formed that taught young doctors how to heal and gave them common ground so that they understood one another. Certifying the skills and principles of healing— authenticating the study, the learning, the experience — was a logical next step.

System administration is not dealing with life-and-death issues (most of the time), but the complexity of the task before us is not all that dissimilar either. How can we even begin to codify the standards and practices that make up the multiplicity of things that we all do, until we first develop a framework for what we do? How can we certify that someone is versed and experienced in that framework until we teach it to them? How can we certify until we educate?

Think about the vendors out there. Each of them wants to certify that you know how to do something, something of value to an organization. They offer training courses, tutorials, and other events for you to learn more about that "something." Then they certify that you have experienced their educational program. SAGE cannot begin to consider certifying a system administrator until the framework is taught. Once that is accomplished, then we will be prepared to consider certifying that people know this framework.

Can we define the framework? Yes. Have we? Not yet. But we can. And we should. We should help build educational resources that can define the framework from vendor schools to universities. In this way we can define the value of our learning and experience, and truly advance the state of the profession