Official Ubuntu Certification Poll

[ubuntu-geek]

Which of the following areas would you (or perhaps your staff) consider most important for official Ubuntu skills certification?

Please take a few seconds and cast your vote so we can help to improve Ubuntu even more

[TravisNewman]

I meant to click the first three, but I missed the first one.

I hadn't even heard there was going to be such a thing. Exciting!

[Stormy Eyes]

Which of the following areas would you (or perhaps your staff) consider most important for official Ubuntu skills certification?

Please take a few seconds and cast your vote so we can help to improve Ubuntu even more

Shouldn't desktop/office competency be a given?

[ubuntu-geek]

Shouldn't desktop/office competency be a given?

This is a poll from Jeff at Canonical we wanted to get feedback on the above topics.

[Stormy Eyes]

This is a poll from Jeff at Canonical we wanted to get feedback on the above topics.

I figured as much. I just thought for a moment, "Certification for use of GNOME and OpenOffice? Absurd. Anybody using Ubuntu should have some skill in this area."

[kvidell]

My question is: Where will this certification do me any good?

Most companies I know of are all over CentOS, RHEL and SuSE/Novell based prodcuts.
Is the idea that I can wave my badge and go "I know an alternative!" ?

I have no problem with that, I'm just wondering what the goal of this will be.
I don't know how well known this Distro is with the buisness/working world.

Is another goal to fix that and make us known?
- Kev

P.S.: I ticked the first three, incase it matters

[ubuntu-geek]

The goal is to get an idea from the forum community on what areas users of Ubuntu would like to get certifed on if this type of certification was available!

[kvidell]

The goal is to get an idea from the forum community on what areas users of Ubuntu would like to get certifed on if this type of certification was available!

Yes, but my question is what would a certification prove to the outside world?
I could have graduated school with some albeit very cool things on my diploma, but it would have been a lot of extra work for no results because no one but a select few who were also at my level would have known what it meant.

That's all

[davahmet]

Let me start off by saying that I absolutely hate certifications. If I offend anyone who signs their name with a bunch of acronyms, I apologize now, but certifications are a fairly recent addition to IT that from the start was used primarily as a marketing tool.

That being said, companies do find value in certifications because it serves as a relatively inexpensive means of employment screening and of marketing implied in-house skills. The base assumption is that a certification verifies competance, which we have all seen is not necessarily the case. To have validity, a certifcation needs to reflect the skills relevant to the product bound to the cert. Since Ubuntu is extraordinarily flexible, will an Ubuntu certification verify skills for all uses of Ubuntu? I would hope not, since that could easily dilute its perceived value.

One of the main differentiators of Ubuntu is its ease of use. That is, you do not have to be a technical genius that prefers reading in hexadecimal and orders coffee in Klingon to install and run it. Normal, everyday mortals can install, maintain and run Ubuntu with little difficulty. The target market appears to be mainly the desktop, so if we have an Ubuntu cert, it makes sense to me that validating desktop support is where we should focus.

P.S. Again, no offense intended to Cert-collectors and/or former Gentoo users that I may have served the wrong flavor of coffee.

[KiwiNZ]

I figured as much. I just thought for a moment, "Certification for use of GNOME and OpenOffice? Absurd. Anybody using Ubuntu should have some skill in this area."

True, but what is wrong with recognising the learning done and the skill level attained with certification?
After all MS have done it for years .