Qualified priviledge

• Article 76 of 77
• Information Age, December 2009
• View the original article online

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In the world of networking, Cisco’s CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) certification is becoming almost a standard requirement for anyone wanting to enter the industry for a technical position.

“There’s a big demand for networking IT skills,” says Sage Lal, who manages the Cisco course at Nescot, Epsom's college of further and higher education, in Surrey. Companies such as Virgin and BP are among the companies sending their staff to become Cisco accredited at Nescot. There they learn how to work with everything from wireless networks to satellite-based communications – something they’re unlikely to pick up through experience.

Cisco courses can be expensive, however, reaching into thousands of pounds for the most difficult and most sought after. Some companies offer their employees the chance to undertake such courses on the condition that they either share the cost or promise to commit to the company for a specified period.

Like Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and other vendors, application vendor SAP has training courses in its own products as well as in disciplines such as business process management.

Historically, these have been aimed at consultants, particularly those implementing SAP products. However, following feedback from end-users of SAP’s products, Susan Martin, global head of certification and training at SAP, has been developing new courses and expanding existing courses to cover material more useful for the end-user. She expects more companies to want to send their employees on these courses, although at the moment, uptake is still mostly among consultants.

Samantha Kinstrey, MD of 2e2 Training, says that product-specific training courses can be useful for teaching all the niceties of a product – at least in theory. However, they frequently come into problems in the real world.

“Most vendors don’t want to teach anything except their own product, but in most situations you’re going to be dealing with another vendor’s products as well,” says Kinstrey. It’s still necessary either for companies to teach the overlap between the different products or for employees to learn through experience, she says.

Bad education
Many organisations have found certain IT qualifications to be less useful than they had anticipated. Postcode Anywhere’s Turner says that some developers who have been on ‘boot camp’ style training courses will look good on paper, but when asked to explain code they’re supposed to have written, they will soon reveal themselves not to have the necessary expertise. Colt’s Leonard says that he wouldn’t rely on qualifications to demonstrate skill: he also uses interviews and the company has an assessment centre.

It’s not just in technical areas that some qualifications can fall short. Informatica’s Young says that people with Project Management Professional (PMP) qualifications, while they understand the requirements of project management, can frequently be dogmatic. “They’re usually more concerned with the process,” he says. Since PMP isn’t IT-specific, that means a tendency to try to make IT fit to PMP rather than vice versa.

And that’s not the only opposition to the use of qualifications: Some CIOs are resistant to the idea of training up employees in case they demand higher salaries or move to other companies. However, 2e2’s Kinstrey says that that is rare.

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