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[Information Needs]A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: The Certification System in Information Technology - October 2000
So what is it? What is it not? And having learned something about it, can we say what it means for traditional higher education.
75. First and foremost, the IT certification universe is an international guild that lies beyond the ken or control of governments. The medieval guild engaged in a form of licensure that was designed to facilitate and control the flow of labor and the level of knowledge/skills necessary to practice a particular trade at the same time that it sought to protect its members from unwanted intrusions and rivals (Le Goff, 1980; White, 1952). In some contrast, IT Industry certification is a form of guild behavior that seeks to expand the labor pool as well as its flow. Its closest labor market analogue in the licensure of allied health field specialties--licensure that is largely borderless and competency-based.
Of course, certification is not a license. The practice of "Webmaster," for example, does not affect human health or safety, so the certificate for such employment is neither regulated nor monitored by public authorities (as is the practice of nursing).
76. Second, because the guild lies beyond governmental oversight, we have little idea of who is involved in certification and where. There are no unduplicated head-counts, there are no central registries, there are no ledgers of providers or instructors. Even in the ITCAP program run by a subsidiary corporation of the Pima Community College District in Arizona, 47 percent of students enrolled in the fall semester, 1999 did not report race/ethnicity and 10 percent did not report gender (age was another story: 75 percent were 30 or older). The closest we come to an accounting is in the third-party testing centers, and because those parties are in competition, whatever information they possess they consider confidential. In fact, the third-party testing centers collect very little data: in the words of a VUE representative: "only...what is necessary to register a candidate for an exam--name and contact information."
77. Third, at the center of this transnational postsecondary system of teaching, learning, and credentialing is not the local institution but the global student. We can call the system "postsecondary" because the level of reading, reasoning, and communication skills necessary to comprehend and apply its content assumes secondary level education in most countries. It is the student who, on entering that system, negotiates different sources and ways of learning without being bound to an institution in a given place in a given country. The e-mail addresses of inquirers and respondents in the examination preparation chat-rooms of brainbuzz.com speak eloquently to a worldwide community studying together. Indeed, what distinguishes this system most from the academic world is that it operates the same way, with the same signals to students, and with the same meanings--though in different languages--in Montreal, Manaus, Munich, Mogadishu, Manila, Moscow, and Milwaukee (see Appendix B).
78. Fourth, the IT guild has brought competency-based education and performance assessment to a status they have never enjoyed within traditional higher education. The guild has implemented, in effect, many of the reforms espoused within the academy in the 1970s and 1980s. In all countries now, this new system cares most about your learning, your demonstrable competence, and your potential in the IT workforce. It sets accessible criterion-referenced standards of performance and is confident enough to turn the judgment of performance over to competent third parties. Where you come from, what you look like, where you went to school, how many credits and what degrees you earned, your SAT or ACT scores--these matters are not even on the radar screen of the IT certification guild.
79. Fifth, the system is not higher education. It is not in the business of helping adolescents become adults, of providing multidimensional education, or of teaching the literacy and numeracy skills necessary to manipulate its own knowledge universe. It is a two-dimensional system, and, for that reason, is not higher education and does not pretend to be. To the extent that formal coursework is part of its offerings, the IT guild's instructors are teachers, not university faculty. They are a different kind of workforce.
Industry certifications, whether in information technology or other fields, replace neither experience nor degrees. Nor do they pretend to represent an assessment of the full range and depth of knowledge, skills, or potential contribution to organizational productivity. Instead, we might say, the certification serves to augment experience and traditional credentials. For their part, employers do not require certification, rather reward it. Microsoft's and Novell's salary surveys consistently evidence a post-certification premium of 4-14 percent in the combination of base pay plus bonuses.
80. Students know this. From their demand-side behavior, the search for certifications other than academic degrees is seen as yielding mobility in "work life." Unlike the period dominated by the guilds, let alone most of the 20th century, labor market experience is no longer linear or unidimensional. People assemble valises of special knowledge and skills, apply them in different work-organization contexts, and modify them by (1) personal predilection, (2) personal perception of potential "work life" paths, and (3) labor market change. With each of these modifications or enhancements, we have come to realize, work life mobility demands the transparent and portable evidence of a certification. We may not be tracking the phenomena well, but the data cited earlier in this monograph suggest that considerable numbers of students are finding these certifications and the "secular" entities that provide the preparation.