Re: Certification

On Fri, Oct 30, 2015 at 7:38 PM, Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> I'm just saying that asking the EDB staff to endorse a certification
> which competes with EDB's certification is not something I personally
> would do.

I think the difficult that we're likely to run into doing this as a
community project is that coming up with a certification program
involves somebody making decisions as to what material will be
included in the certification and what material will not.  Generally,
if you have 5 community members, they will have 6 opinions on any
given topic, so getting cross-company agreement on exactly what should
be part of a certification exam sounds hard.  If the content of that
exam is known in detail to some companies and not others, those
companies have a major advantage in preparing a training curriculum
that will let people pass the exam.  If the content of the exam is
totally public, it won't be a very meaningful exam because anybody who
likes can look up all the answers in advance.  Also, somebody probably
will post an answer key on the Internet.  Now with a certification
class offered by a particular company, like EDB, the company matches
the certification exams to the training class that company offers.  If
somebody is certified by EDB, then it's up to whoever sees that to
judge whether that certification actually has any value to them, but
at least you know it probably matches up with the training curriculum
EDB offers.

Disclaimer: I don't have any involvement with either the EDB training
curriculum or the EDB certification stuff.  If there's a community
consensus around how to actually go forward with this, I'll certainly
try to figure out who here is doing that stuff and talk to them about
it.  The above paragraph is merely my personal view on why that may be
hard.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company