A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: The Certification System in Information Technology - October 2000

IT Certifications: the Basic Universe

17. As Microsoft's home page for certification notes, the difference between a certificate and the courses you might take lies in the former's attestation to benchmarking. Table 3 reflects the presence of IT certifications in job postings:

Among the "other" certifications mentioned?

and dozens more. There are certifications in programming, network management, training, and telecommunications, certifications from specific vendors and generic certifications from industry associations. Christianson and Fajen's helpful 1999 guide to certifications describes nearly 300 of them (a decade earlier, then was only one, the CNE), and this universe was dated by the time Christianson and Fajen went to press! Brainbuzz.com (a site for assisting people preparing for certification examinations) listed over 350 certifications by mid-2000, and the "Certification Watch" for June 2000, marked 11 new certifications. The woods of certification are coming to resemble the forest of bachelor's and associate's degrees delivered in over 1,000 fields by over 3,000 institutions of higher education and in which (as notices in The Chronicle of Higher Education attest) a half-dozen trees are planted weekly.

18. Across the roughly 3,500 job advertisements, one out of eight mentioned an IT industry certification as a preferred background for employment. To garner a preliminary indicator of change, I returned to the Washington Post Sunday "Technology Employment" sections in March 2000, and found roughly one out of seven. Within a few years, perhaps one out of five will do so--the same ratio as we currently find for formal postsecondary credentials (though formal degrees are usually requirements, not enhancements).

19. This growth will come from the supply side. As Christianson and Fajen document, more than 50 major corporate vendors, IT industry associations, and large intermediary "training partners" such as Learning Tree (which reports serving 113,000 IT students) have formally established criterion-referenced standards for what it takes to perform at an optimal level in various parts of the information technology and telecommunications worlds. Another 7,500 corporate vendors with global workforces recognize these standards. When you hang out a criterion-referenced sign, you are providing a public set of educational objectives and a supply-side opportunity. In a learning society such as ours, people reach for those objectives, and employers feel free to encourage a proxy for attainment.

Some certifications thus function like degrees. Other certifications function like licenses in that they require renewal. For example, after one receives the mantel of Certified Internet Webmaster one must work at the role for two years and complete 30 hours of continuing education to qualify for recertification. In all Microsoft Certified Professional programs, as exams are retired and replaced, one is required to take the new assessments to remain certified. Novell adds examinations as the state of knowledge changes, and in unmistakably uncompromising language: "All CNE certified individuals are required to pass the exam for either course 529 [Netware5 Update] or 570 [Netware5 Advanced Administration] by August 31, 2000. Failure to do so will result in loss of CNE status."

[First Signs and Traces][Playing by the Numbers]