Certification Evolution:Job role certification for your future
Application Development
The certification industry has evolved dramatically over the years. From vendor-driven programs designed to ensure a large and ready supply of trained and prepared technicians to support their products and services, certifications have rapidly shifted to industry- and customer-driven programs designed to solve large gaps in the ability to provide services across a number of technologies, disciplines and vendors.
As is the case with most forms of professional accreditation in other fields, in order for certifications to grow and gain the level of acceptance we’d all like to see, broadly accepted industry standards of knowledge, skill and performance must be easily portable from job to job, industry to industry, based on the ability to support a job role or job function.
In the Beginning
The fundamental driver behind the creation of a job-role certification is a perceived unmet need, which goes beyond a given technology or vendor to cause general disruption in the industry. Such was the case more than 20 years ago when I first entered the IT industry, first as a help-desk analyst, then as a hardware and software technician. As anyone in the industry could see, there was an incredibly broad array of different people out there who called themselves computer technicians (or in the now-quaint term, PC professionals). People looking to hire individuals or companies to provide even basic computer-support services were in a quandary—how do I know that the people I’m hiring have basic computer-support skills? Other than calling references (and hopefully I’m not getting their bar buddy, neighbor or cousin), how do I have an independent validation that this person has a certain level of basic skills?
Ultimately, the different leading companies in our industry at the time, including such notables as Novell, Microsoft, Compaq and others, came together with industry association CompTIA to form the first vendor-independent job-role certification, A+. Still one of the most successful certification programs in the industry after almost 15 years, A+ solved the most fundamental certification requirement of all. What’s the baseline? How does one establish basic proficiency in PC hardware and operating systems? Not surprisingly, given the combination of strong market demand and broad support from the vendor community, A+ has grown to be an enormous success around the globe. In fact, the best measure of the growing maturity of a country’s IT infrastructure and service capabilities is still the growth rate of their A+-certified professionals.
Beyond A+: Building New BaselinesOnce
A+ had become clearly established as the industry baseline, we certainly couldn’t stop there and declare victory. Ours is an extremely broad and diverse industry, with dozens of different job functions that come together to form baskets of IT services. This includes an enormous array of different vendor-independent and job-role certifications.
CompTIA, faced with the almost impossible task of following up A+ (imagine Michael Jackson following up the "Thriller" album, which sold 40-million-plus copies), chose the burgeoning field of PC networking for its next certification program, the widely respected Network+. Again, the industry lacked a good core set of skills for people who would be responsible for installing and configuring PC network hardware and configuring systems to use the now-ubiquitous TCP/IP client to support access to this new-at-the-time thing called the World Wide Web. Network+ came to the rescue, providing core skills to ensure that a new networking technician understood the core concepts of PC networking and could not only set up a PC (a la A+), but set up network connectivity for it as well. As PC use shifted from predominantly local toolkits (productivity applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint) to network-based applications (like e-mail and the Web), this was a mission-critical need and one that Network+ still meets today. To people thinking of entering the industry for the first time, A+ and Network+ are still the baseline certifications I recommend to create a broad proficiency in computers and networking.
The Great Divide
Once we pass the core PC certifications of A+ and Network+, certification families split widely according to the IT jobs and job functions they support. This includes certifications for Web designers and developers, application developers, security professionals, storage professionals, project managers and business analysts.
Web Design and Development
The CIW certification covers job roles in network administration, security, application development, programming, Web site design and e-commerce. It’s best known as the vendor-independent certification of choice for Web designers and developers. Their menu of certification options includes:
Given how this segment of the industry has developed, the .NET vs. Java/J2EE wars have not left a whole lot of room for vendor-independent certifications. J2EE certifications are offered by Sun, IBM, BEA, Oracle and others, while Microsoft certifies .NET developers.
Where we will likely see the emergence of vendor-independent job-role certifications is in the function of enterprise-application architects. As we move to a development environment defined by the application flexibility of Web services and component-assembled applications, having people with a broad array of skills to help architect these types of hybrid applications will be essential. Most of the key players on the J2EE side and Microsoft on the .NET side have a vendor-focused certification in this area. For the good of the industry, they should set these aside and come together to produce a Web Services Architect certification that would allow us to credentialize these critical people properly.
Security
The security-certification space has grown dramatically in the past few years, and with the U.S. government’s widespread backing of security certification for Department of Defense personnel, we can expect even more dramatic growth over the next four years. Although some demand will exist for baseline-level security certifications such as CompTIA’s Security+, the larger growth will be in the higher-end certifications for career security professionals, especially ISC2 CISSP and CISA, and the SANS Institute’s GIAC certifications. There also will be specialized demand for security certification in a number of sub-areas, such as wireless networking, where certifications such as the Planet3Wireless CWSP will add value, and ethical hacking, which will have a small but diligent constituency. For best impact, combine one of the senior security certifications such as CISSP with certification in a key security technology family such as Cisco, CheckPoint or Microsoft, and you’ll likely have success.
Storage
Once the red-headed stepchild of the IT industry, storage has become a central issue in most large organizations and a key specialization. The emergence of storage networking, in both SAN and NAS, has created a role for people who can specialize in setting, managing, protecting and supporting storage infrastructure. With the vast growth rates of data-storage needs and the proliferation of rich-media solutions, this need will only grow.
To support the growth of storage-area networks supporting fibre channel, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) provides a core SAN certification called Storage Networking Certified Professional (SNCP). Recent advances have broken this out into three job-role functions, including foundational skills, practitioner and specialist. These programs will continue to evolve and will likely have the most impact when combined with key 
vendor programs from storage leaders such as EMC, Network Appliance and Brocade.
Project Management
Long before IT got religion about project management, the broader industry saw the need to pull together the vast array of methods, tools, processes and terminology project managers use to ensure communications would be sustained and projects would actually be completed. Although IT professionals should consider looking at foundation project-management certifications such as CompTIA’s IT Project+, the certification family with the most impact in the industry has to be the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Professional (PMP) certification. PMP is widely considered the gold standard for project managers and is often required to be considered for many project-management job roles. This certification has an explicit experience requirement, so for those of you still working up to that, passing PMI’s Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) is certainly a way to show that you’re an up-and-comer. As IT becomes more and more an industry of managing many collective projects and groups, some internal to your organization and perhaps others external, having this skill set is essential for every IT professional who wants a long career. Technologies will come and go, but the ability to manage people, resources and money to create impact for a business will always stand the test of time.
Business Analysis
The fastest growing job-role in IT today is a senior role called the business analyst. These professionals work with various business units to assess areas of greatest business need for IT services. They determine the relative financial benefits that can accrue to the organization for different types of projects, and they recommend the projects that will create the most positive impact for the business. Business analysts work with business-unit leaders to capture requirements for services (whether the services are software, access or other capabilities that will enable organizations to be more competitive), and then they work with IT organizations and project leaders to translate business requirements into technical requirements. Ultimately, business analysts are responsible for making sure the right projects get the investment, people and resources needed to deliver results for an organization, and typically they are compensated based on delivering the promised results.
Although there are a few small organizations providing business-analyst certification, the forthcoming International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) certification appears to be the one to watch because it is being built from a comprehensive and industry-backed Body of Knowledge (BoK), similar to the process that formed PMI’s PMP. Make this the year to get training in business analysis to get ahead of the curve on this important area, and make sure your provider will support the IIBA certification when it comes out.
ITIL/ITSM
The U.S. IT industry prides itself on innovation, but at times it forgets to institute good processes to support the delivery of services with quality and consistency. Starting in the early 1990s, the United Kingdom invested in the creation of best-practices guidelines for providing a number of different types of IT services. The result of its efforts was the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL offers the ability to provide high-quality, consistent processes and outcomes for various types of IT services, such as application management, security management, service-desk provision and many other functions.
The three levels of ITIL certification—foundations, practitioner and service manager—have been worldwide standards for IT service management for a number of years, but the United States is only now beginning to catch up. In the near future, virtually all IT organizations will need to demonstrate their support for these types of service standards in order to win (or keep) business, in much the same way PC technicians in the beginning needed to get A+ to show a credential, even if their skills were more advanced. Find out if your organization is planning to adopt ITIL, and get on board quickly to start your preparation. If you are an independent consultant or IT services firm, it’s even more important to get on this right away or risk missing out on key requirements in future RFPs.
Work with training centers that use accredited providers, and ask about the qualifications of your instructor. Training for these services can be a bit immature, so make sure your instructor has many years of experience consulting and teaching ITIL.
Where We’re Headed
In many ways, the certification market is at last heading toward the maturity we’re seeking, which will raise the impact and value of certification. If you look at other areas of accreditation, they focus on key enabling services that provide value to an organization. For example, think of accreditation programs for universities, bar associations for attorneys, CPAs and many other credentialing bodies. They focus on delivering a whole service that adds value, regardless of the tools, vendors or technologies that underlie their work. Likewise, IT is moving steadily away from notions of "vendor" certifications or "vendor-independent" certifications to certifications that focus on customer impacts and key IT service-delivery capabilities that align more precisely to the job functions organizations need to fill. It will continue to force IT professionals to bring skills that will directly add value to the business. This shift will unquestionably be a hybrid of what we used to call "hard and soft skills," but now are more reliably called technical and business-management skills. With the added complexity and responsibility of this work also will come more authority and better compensation. It’s a brave new world, but embrace it because it will create many new opportunities for you.
June 2008 - Patrick von Schlag
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