I had been looking at the site earlier in the week and wondered if it was worth doing ?
As I dont use ubuntu now and really dont need yet another qualification I decided NOT FROM ME
Be then started to look for other courses, exams and levels, there are many around, but how do you choose and are they worth anything in the job market today ?
Coming through after university I did as they came up, novell, microsoft, lotus, apple, Cisco mainly paid for by my employer which then helped me leave and move onwards and upwards, finally when my own staff were asking they were discouraged as like me they took exams to move on. Our human resources tried changing contracts to keep the. For a period after but that faild.
I then did a load of on line learning as could not get courses in english whilst in france.
I have a few certifications too, but I don’t think any of them really helped me in my career or got me a job. These days it is probably different. You couldn’t get in the door without some certifications on the resume.
When I working in the public Sector we had to write job spécialisé to get approval to advertise the job then scan all alicante to match the spec, but it was not easy. 20 years experiance vs microsoft Certified getting your foot in the door first step.
Even to go on one of our uni courses had to have selection critères
Quite often I overlooked the spec and just chose someone because and no real reason.
I managed the team teaching women into technology course, the spec I wrote asked for a certain level of education, but had women applied who gave up school, brought up a family and wanted to return to the market that gave me more than saying got a o level.
Exactly… whatever happened to a general education?
Mechanics dont do training for specific car brands … they are taught to work on any brand of vehicle.
Why cant there be a general trade certificate for computing?.. then some might get to use computers intelligently, instead of blindly following a set of ‘Ubuntu Rules’
So that is it. This Certificate nonsense is all about making it easy for someone to write and apply job specs. Public service nonsense. Well at least you had some personal say to overrule it.
That is how I see it. A Certificate is something you do in a few hours on a spare week. A real trade education takes 2-3 years in most fields, and maybe an Apprenticeship as well.
All education costs .
I think computer workers are being exploited by this nonsense about training in very specific applications.
In other fields , you get a more general education and learn how to apply it.
I had a technician once who had no computer training courses at all… she had a Tech Colledge training in Microbiology … ie she could use a microscope. We gave her on job trainig. She could learn to do anything… alI I had to do was drop the manual on her desk … she would wade thru it and next thing the whole program would be installed and configured and working.
She became an excellent C programmer… by reading the Kernigan and Ritche book and me providing some examples. She managed data backups for a whole CSIRO Division across all states of Australia. In short she could apply herself to any problem..
Now, tell me how to write that into a ‘job spec’
Paying for a computer course could not have made such a person any more skilled.
Trying to automate appointments by insisting on bits of paper is driving a whole industry of expensive useless courses.
That’s the most important thing you learn in school: how to learn.
However, there is nothing wrong with having certifications and degrees and such. That is evidence of something you know how to do. It doesn’t make you dumber or less qualified.
It’s good you were able to see you had a potentially quality employee and hired her. That’s impossible to see from a resume it seems to me.
It is difficult. We fluked it a number of times.
I once picked a radiation nurse as a replacement computer technician. She turned out to be one of our best ever group leaders… she could handle people.
A lot of our technicians came from rural families. They seemed to have a healthier mindset than urban recruits.
The undesirable bit is being able to obtain a certificate without also acquiring any general learning ability.
The British computer society tried to do this with the European computer driving licence in the 1980. I did the exam so I could teach it at our health authority but a lot of it was just theory and had no practical value unless you were going into computer science.
Then RSA tried CLAIT for computer literacy again it ran for several years and died.
As pointed out I need someone with Ubuntu skills transfer to mint no big deal or to debian but red hat network…..
They used to say " The best computer programmers come from Arts, not Science"
They need to be inventive.
If someone cant make that transition (to redhat) what are they lacking?.. not knowledge, you can acquire that, … what they are lacking is a deeper understanding that would allow them to rethink the situation when there are changes.
I employed a guy with a first class honors degree for one teaching post, he had the knowledge but not the skills to teach or motivate students, put it down to his age not being that far from the students under his wing
Had other techs who would spend days trying to install network connections they had the abilities to feed and place câbles at technician level but then were stuck at the consoles trying different configuration but not having the knowledge to do it
