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

First Signs and Traces

12. This report on industry certification emerged indirectly from an exploration of community college/labor market interactions through posted criteria for hiring in entry and mid-level information technology jobs. The early phase of this study involved a content analysis of IT job ads in the Sunday "Technology Employment" classified section of The Washington Post. The Post is an extremely rich source, particularly as the Washington, DC metropolitan area now ranks in the top 10 as a market for high tech workers, though precisely where in the top 10 depends on who conducted the survey and how the universe of "high tech workers" was defined (Behr, 1999). Classified ads are good unobtrusive data, the kind loved by historians, biologists, and anthropologists everywhere! They are the footprints on the forest floor, far more reliable than surveys. Between April of 1998 and April of 1999, I read over 3,500 discrete job postings covering an estimated 20,000 technical positions other than those specifying senior status or more than five years of experience. To determine the reliability of these observations of the language used in the Post advertisements, another 350 job postings in the San Jose Mercury News (serving Silicon Valley) between February and April of 1999 were subjected to the same analysis. To determine the durability of these observations, approximately 300 job ads in The Washington Post during March, 2000 were also examined.

12.1 The content of the advertisements was sorted into five category bins: degrees/ credentials, amount/types of experience (including job tasks and industry), specific software, programming, and operating systems expertise, general technical skills, and non-technical skills. The language of each content area was scanned for dominant and distinctive features.

12.2 As table 1 demonstrates, only 21 percent of these advertisements mentioned a formal degree as a criterion of employment. A small number of entries cited specific course work (but not degrees) in computer graphics, physics, and "higher math," implying that course work can be a proxy for competence. Some notable entries went out of their way to diminish the importance of a traditional credential with such phrases as "4 years technical experience in lieu of degree," "BS preferred but experience counts more," and "2+ years of programming experience preferred but [emphasis added] college grads considered." As a recruiter at a high tech career fair held in Chantilly, Va. in July 2000 remarked: "I am not going to take a $50,000 risk on some dropout tinkering with motherboards in a garage who my boss says is a genius: the degree diminishes the risk somewhat, but experience reduces it immensely because experience generates evidence of what you can do in an organization."

13. For a position requiring fluency in HTML, Java, Perl, C++, and UNIX the applicant was asked to "Forward URLs of prior design work," and nary a word about degrees appeared. This is a true performance assessment. No resume. Send us your URL. We'll log on and observe your communications skills, your technical skills, your knowledge, your artistic sensibilities. If we are good assessors of performance, we may even make some measured inferences about your ability to discover contexts for and to solve unstructured problems.

"Multi-threaded development" was a common demonstrable competence required of these jobs: the creation of a software stage for interactions where some actors must wait, others must be notified, and the players don't all talk at the same time (see Brogden, 1999, p. 173). When one thinks carefully about it, the criteria for creating both workable URLs and the mini-dramas of programming involve some of the same kind of reasoning skills higher education says its seeks to develop regardless of major. And designing transactions in client/server environments is very much like identifying logically-related events (with no extraneous material) in many other disciplines. In fact, when degrees were mentioned in the job advertisements, the fields were not confined to computer science, management information systems, and computer/ electrical engineering. Others mentioned included music, linguistics, history, physical sciences, mathematics, museology, journalism and English (for technical writing positions). The masters of the information technology universe understand a great deal about where intellectual muscles can be developed.

14. A basic competence-matrix, one that combines "years of experience" with knowledge of both generic and specific systems and software, dominates the presentation of jobs in the classified ads. This competence-matrix, as we will see, is also embedded in the course offerings of the new secular providers, where the notion of "prerequisites" is as likely to include prior experience as prior coursework. The "degree structure" of some industry certifications follows a similar routine: to progress from "Associate" to "Master" (in Cisco's certification system, the levels are labeled "Associate," "Professional," and "Expert") requires years of experience in addition to passing examinations in discrete knowledge areas. When the International Webmasters Association's "Standards of Practice" defines "knowledge" as "informed understanding of the subject matter of a member's field of practice or employment, based on education and experience," and "technical competence" as "knowledge and the skillful application of knowledge," it makes explicit what we see in the job postings. The data of table 2, drawn from analyses of the job advertisements, puts these dimensions of competence together in the area of programming languages.

15. In about 40 percent of the posted jobs for early career positions, then, what the industry wants to know is not merely whether you can write Java and Java Script, but how long you have been practicing. The combination is a sign to an employer that you are ready for the next step, whether in programming, operating systems, servers, networks, or Web development. The next step is the certification of competence, the moment at which your acquired knowledge and skills are benchmarked.

16. Beyond the type of requirements reflected in the competence matrix, the ads often cited what to me, at the time, were strange abbreviations

"You must . . . hold (or be actively seeking) CCDA [Certified Cisco Design Associate] certification."

"You should possess (or be able to achieve) CCNA [Cisco Certified Network Associate] certification with a strong desire for CCIE [Cisco Certified InterNetworking Expert]."

"CNE [Certified Novell Engineer] a big plus."

While the language seems a bit hesitant, as if it were reflecting an emerging phenomenon, these are instances of the IT industry's formal certifications of competence. Some people who hold these certifications are not so hesitant, however. The signatures on more than one of the communications received in the course of researching this topic were in the form,

"John Doe
MCSE, Master ASE [Compaq]"

The acronyms are not puffery. They are evolving into professional markers, a reflection of the way in which the occupants of technical positions increasingly see their "expertise and contribution to the work process . . . within the professional division of labor" (Nelson and Barley, 1994, p. 22).

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