So I’m now in the market for a new job.  I’ve spent the last month taking some online classes and looking at different opportunities.  I’ve also been thinking back on my time at Novell and the things I learned about certification, testing, and training.  Turns out I’ve learned a lot of new things, and have  an appreciation for certification that I didn’t have when I started.

Nothing brought that to the forefront more than an “Ask Slashdot” posting about which certifications are best.

My answers to this question are buried in the comments, so I’ll reproduce them here.  The first is in response to this comment suggesting that one should create their own certification.

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The parent here is perhaps meant to be funny, but there is a nugget of truth in what he says.

Actually creating a certification takes a lot of work – I spent the past 5 years working as part of the team that worked on IT certification programs and exams at Novell. But to understand what certifications hold value in the industry, it does help to understand the process by which a program is created, because if a program isn’t built around sound principles, then the certification will be worthless as anything other than a wall decoration.

First, you have to certify based on something people actually do. Certifications that have real value start with a job task analysis (JTA) and the program is built around what people actually do for a living. It doesn’t do you any good to certify based on criteria that don’t map to a specific job function.

Second, the testing methodology needs to be sound. People laugh about paper certifications, but paper certs are a real problem in the industry. This can happen because a question pool is leaked and a ‘braindump’ is created. Dealing with braindump sites is like playing whack-a-mole. So the testing methodology should resist braindumps, either through adaptive testing or through the use of performance based testing (sometimes called ‘practical testing’ or some variation of that). Practical testing tends to be more resistant to braindumps because that type of resource gives you the answer – but in a practical exam, you have to demonstrate the application of the answer. So if the braindump tells you “do x, y, and z”, those are the steps you need to do to complete the tasks.

If a certification is ISO 17024 compliant, then it has increased value as well. That ISO standard specifies a number of things (which are adopted by other organisations, like ANSI) about how a certification is built. Vendor-specific certifications tend to not be ISO 17024 compliant (there are a few exceptions) sometimes because of cost or resource requirements. As I understand it, there are pieces of the standard that specify, for example, that the people who create the exam and the people who create the course materials cannot talk with each other about the content. The JTA information can (I think, it might be required or recommended) be shared between the two groups, but they must derive their own information from the pool of information about the topic. The purpose for this is that it’s the knowledge that’s needed, rather than the specific course materials created by the certifying body. In some cases, the certifying body just publishes the objectives and leaves it to others to create the courses around those objectives.

I’m also of the opinion that the value is higher if rather than relying on recall for answers, the exam requires cognitive skills. Exams like this tend to be much more labor intensive to create and evaluate properly to ensure they’re fair, but that value is significant as well because then the certification shows that the candidate knows more than just the answer to the questions on the exam, but how to apply their knowledge in a useful way. Performance-based tests are really the best way to do this in my opinion.

The exams also must have gone through some form of psychometric analysis in order to be legally defensible. If a program uses multiple exam forms (which is generally the case), then the psychometric analysis is used to ensure the forms are fairly balanced and if a candidate can pass the exam on form 1, that they would most likely pass it on the other forms as well.

Thirdly, a properly built certification program is going to have continuing certification requirements. Some organizations (like CompTIA) used to certify “once and forever”, but certifications like that really don’t have that much value over the long term. I hold an LPIC-1 certification that I got in 2003, but that doesn’t really tell anyone what I know about modern Linux distributions.

Certifications are helpful if you’re going through the ‘front door’ trying to find a job – applying through a website or through a company’s HR department. Certifications (like other things you might list on a CV or resume) are keywords that will get your qualifications looked at. More and more companies are using automated systems to sort through submitted CVs/resumes, so it helps to know what the company is looking for. But as others have said, it’s better to work through an ‘insider’ (ie, someone you know at a company) to get a leg up on a job. That said, positions that I’ve been looking at have had an emphasis on project management, so PMI’s PMP or CAPM certifications would be considered valuable. In the IT field, PMI’s certs are useful, Six Sigma certification might be valuable depending on the industry, or looking at something like Novell’s CLP/CLE, RedHat’s RHCT/RHCE, and some of the Microsoft certifications are sought after (though from MS probably not the MCSE as much any more; they have some programs that are ISO 17024 compliant and those would be seen as being more valuable). LPI’s LPIC-* certs are also valuable, and the more current CompTIA certifications also have value, though myself I’d look at the more advanced certifications both organisations offer.

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I’d been thinking in terms of Linux and non-IT-specific certifications, and clearly missed out on mentioning the Cisco and Citrix certifications.

My second response was to this comment about the overall tenor of the comments being “certification is worthless”:

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I think [the people who said certification is worthless] posted based on their own experiences in the field of IT. I also have a certain amount of cynicism about the value certifications; I didn’t earn any until after I started with Novell 8 years ago.

Of the ones that I took, the exams that I found to be the most challenging (and rewarding to pass) were the performance-based exams associated with the Novell Certified Directory Engineer (which was definitely a cert worth earning when it was available) and with the Novell Certified Linux Professional. RedHat’s exams are similar, and I know that their focus is on doing only performance-based testing (to my knowledge, they don’t have any exams that are traditional forms-based exams).

There are a lot of people who create certifications who really don’t understand what the goal is, and they don’t go through the process of a proper psychometric evaluation of their exams, which means the tests aren’t fair or an accurate representation of what a person knows. The fact that there are braindumps available for so many exams also devalues the certification because people rely on short-term memorisation of an answer key rather than actually learning what is needed to pass the exams, and eventually the assumption becomes that anyone who earned the certification likely earned it not by learning the actual content but rather by taking the ‘easy way’ and just learning what was on the exam.

The goal of any properly created certification (or exam) is to demonstrate competence for the minimally-qualified candidate. It sets a bar, but particularly at the entry level, it is only for the candidate at the lowest knowledge or skill. Experience counts more for a lot of employers (and I depended on that for years), but there are some (and I interviewed with one 15 years ago myself) who get hung up on the candidate not holding a certification, so not having it can be a barrier (or for me, not having it was a qualifier for a prospective employer – if the cert was more important to them than my experience, I didn’t want to work for them).

Clearly, though, there are fields where certification is mandatory. To practice medicine in the US, for example, you need to be board certified. To work on cars, you generally need your ASE. To be an accountant, you need to be a CPA. To practice law, you have to pass the bar exam (which is a license, but licensing and certification are closely related).

The original purpose of IT certification (which Novell started in the industry) was to provide technical support resources outside Novell’s support organization who were competent to support NetWare – the sales growth Novell saw at the time meant they couldn’t build a large enough support staff to adequately provide technical support for the product. The CNE was created largely for partner organizations to prove to customers that their staff understood NetWare well enough to support it, and at that time (back in the mid- to late- 80′s) it was required for people to provide support on the product.

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I think these two comments sum up a lot of what I’ve talked about on this blog to date.

As for my future, we’ll see what it brings.  If you know of someone who would benefit from my experience, please drop me a line.

As I’ve been working through that topic, I’ve also been reading books on a wide variety of topics that all loosely tie in to learning and education.  Today, as I was reading Daniel H. Pink’s book Drive:  The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, I got to the section on mastery, and I got to thinking as I was reading the section about how that idea fits in with technical certification and even how it helps me understand what, in my one of first posts in this blog, I described as my skepticism about technical certification.

Before we talk about certification, we need to define what it is.  Certification is a measurement of the minimal knowledge or skill required to perform a task or a job.

Thus, one who is a Certified Public Accountant is someone who has passed an exam that is used to measure their minimum qualifications to act as an accountant.  Someone who has not passed that exam has not met the minimum requirements to enter that profession.

The same is true of any profession that has a certification or licensing requirement.  You wouldn’t want to engage a lawyer who had failed the bar exam for the jurisdiction, but we all probably would agree that a lawyer who passed by 1 point, while they may not be our first choice to represent us in court, is someone who has met the requirements to be licensed to practice law.

This brings me to the Pink book:  In the section on mastery, Pink talks about people being driven by wanting to master a skill or a topic.  On page 96 (of the eBook version available from Barnes & Noble), there is discussion about teaching a group of 5th and 6th graders a set of skills and then, after they’ve validated they learned the materials, they were turned loose on problems that extended beyond what they’d learned.  Some students, described as “subscrib[ing] to the idea that brain-power is fixed” gave up on the problem and blamed their lack of intelligence for the lack of success.  A second set of students, though, who subscribed to the idea that intelligence can be increased, kept working and rather than blaming their lack of intelligence, didn’t “blame” anything – they recognized that “setbacks were inevitable on the road to mastery and that they could even be guideposts for the journey.” (Page 97).

Now, how does this play into my skepticism about technical certification?

Personally, I have always thought about my own technical skills in terms of attaining mastery rather than passing an exam.  Put simply, I didn’t want to be thought of as having met a minimum requirement, but rather as having attained mastery of the subject matter.  With that in mind, I didn’t bother taking exams that proved how smart I was, because so many people see certification as an end point rather than as a checkpoint.

Put another way, attaining mastery is about the journey, rather than the destination.

To that end, though, certification serves a very useful purpose:  To help check along the way that the individual is learning what they need to learn in order to be on the right road to get them to mastery.  With the learner-centric model, one of the ideas is to help with the iterative process of learning, assessing, and refining, and certification can be a useful tool in order to help with refining the search for knowledge in order to progress towards mastery.

As I discussed yesterday, the model that we’re moving from is a classroom-centric or content-centric model.   What I mean by that is that the focus is all about content – what goes in the course, how the course is structured, does the flow of the course build on previously discussed objectives and a pre-determined (and for the most part, non-personalized) learning path.

For example, to achieve the Novell CLP11 certification, you start with courses 3101 and 3102, take the Novell CLA11 exam, then go through course 3103 and take the Novell CLP11 practicum.  The path is published and defines what objectives you must meet – based on Novell’s analysis of the job that the certification applies to – in order to be certified in that area.

The focus is on the content for the learning path and the learner’s focus tends to be more on the delivery of the content (followed by the passing of exams, created in conjunction with the course materials – a discussion of that could be an entirely separate blog entry) rather than on the student’s specific and individal needs.

It is worth mentioning that even in the current certification model, there is a certain amount of self-selection that takes place; a candidate may look at the objectives and outline for course 3101 and determine that they already possess that knowledge, so they can skip that material and move on to course 3102.  In that situation, if the student finds that they are missing something that is covered in the first course, they may have an increased difficulty in keeping up in the second class because they perhaps missed a part of the self-assessment that was necessary.

There are perhaps a few reasons this can happen.  When thinking about a knowledge domain, there are three areas that one can break the domain into:

1. The things you know
2. The things you know you don’t know
3. The things you don’t know you don’t know

The learner, in self-selecting how to meet their needs, tends to apply areas 1 and 2 in their quest for knowledge; area 3 is difficult for a learner to self-select, because by doing so, that knowledge moves from domain 3 into domain 2.  Put another way,  the differentiator between domains 2 and 3 is an awareness of the knowledge they are lacking.

In looking at a traditional instructor-led training scenario, the content becomes the focal point out of necessity.  The instructor is teaching a group, and in teaching a group, the content is the common “thing” that the group shares.  They have come together in a classroom in order to participate in the social experience of learning what is in the course.

They may enter the class with different experience/knowledge levels and different expectations, but (ideally) when they leave the class, they will have a shared base of common knowledge and their knowledge level (at least) will likely tend to be convergent.  The reason for this is that the training material and delivery they receive is a shared experience, not an individual experience – though through the individualized interpretation of the material, they will have some degree of individualized experiences and there will thus be variations in the outcomes from the class.

In a classroom, the interaction that takes place that guides the class and the instructor to the proper subset of the material being covered (as itself it could be viewed as a micro-BoK) at that time is an iterative process that both instructor and class engage in so naturally that it usually isn’t even thought about:  That of checking the class’ understanding of what has been covered up until this point.

The constraints of the classroom, however, also impose limits on the amount of time the instructor can spend ensuring every individual student understands the concepts being presented, because there is also an expectation that in the allotted time the class runs for, all of the content will be covered – and if the content isn’t all covered, that is usually reflected in the  customer satisfaction scores for the class.

A learner-centric training model starts with the presumption of an individualized learning experience and works backwards from that instead of starting with the content and working backwards.

To achieve this type of approach, I think, requires a different approach to content creation than the traditional ADDIE development model.  The ADDIE model depends on starting with a needs analysis and then filters the Body of Knowledge (BoK) and distills it into a predetermined subset of the BoK from which the curriculum is derived.

In a learner-centric model, pre-filtering the BoK makes assumptions about the learner’s set of knowledge that may or may not be valid.  Thus, ideally, the entire BoK needs to be available, and the learner needs to have the ability to be guided to the proper subset of the BoK that is relevant to what they want to learn.

I see at least three challenges to this approach:

1. Incorporating that iterative process of checking understanding and incorporating it into a learning model that has a focus on an individualized learning path that guides the student to the materials they need in order to fill in the gaps in their knowledge.
2. Providing that iterative assessment of understanding in the flow of the course in a way that is natural, consistent, and unobtrusive  so it becomes – as it is in the traditional model – transparent.
3. In the development process, identifying the BoK accurately and comprehensively enough to meet the needs of the majority of learners’ needs and then maintaining that BoK in a way that keeps the details current as the product evolves (and the details change) while maintaining the overarching theme the product covers in a way that is testable, measurable, and thus certifiable.

I don’t think any of these challenges is insurmountable, but it will be interesting to see how the technology evolves to address them in the online world.

In my next post on this topic, I’ll dive deeper into the delivery elements for content in the learner-centric model.

So what have I been up to the last 14 months?

Currently, I still am the testing program manager – or one of them.  The other is Randy Hugie, who has been handling exam content creation for our traditional exams, delivered through Pearson/VUE.  Randy also has responsibility as the certification program manager; the two of us work very closely together on both certification and testing at Novell, since I spent some time working within the certification team when I returned to the training organization about 4 years ago and started managing the instructor programs.

Up until February of 2010, all of my knowledge and experience in the world of testing was the result of direct, hands-on involvement in managing the day-to-day operations of the practicum exam systems and programs.  That took a fair amount of my time, and in that space of time I didn’t feel as though I had much to say on the subject (hence the unexpected extended absence) because I was in what I call “sponge” mode for the first 6-8 months of that time.

Which is to say that I was learning everything I could by doing the job and operating the business.

What have I learned?  That there is a lot more to the world of testing than meets the eye.  The ultimate goal is what I had indicated previously (measuring skills and knowledge) – but the process of developing exams, validating them, and publishing them is far more complex than I had imagined.

In some ways, it has been a journey not unlike my earlier technical journey in learning Novell’s eDirectory product (a journey that in some ways seems like a lifetime ago) – the more I learned, the more I discovered I didn’t know.  And so down the rabbit hole I went.

My journey could (in some ways) be said to have culminated in February of 2010, when I had the opportunity to attend the Association of Test Publisher’s conference (entitled “Innovations in Testing”) in Orlando, Florida.  This was the first non-technical (as in “non-IT”) conference I had ever been to, and it was like exploring an entirely new world.

I sat in on sessions on item analysis, forensic analysis of exam results, deep psychometric analysis (most of that went so far over my head as to make me remark to an old friend who was a fellow attendee that “the words are all English but it makes NO sense to me at all”), intellectual property protection, and many other interesting topics.

I also spent a fair amount of time talking to the different testing vendors who were exhibiting at the show; that also was an incredibly interesting experience, because – not knowing anyone but a few people from Pearson/VUE who I knew would be there (or so I thought, until I ran into the previously-mentioned old friend) – I opted to wear Novell-branded shirts while at the conference.  The reception was incredible, because many people who work for those vendors used to work for Novell or had at one time or another been involved in Novell’s early certification programs, either internally or externally, and there was significant interest in what Novell is doing today and where we’re headed in our training programs.

I should mention as well, probably, that along with testing, I also end up handling a fair number of customer questions, certification questions, and requests for information on data from our certification database (mostly customer updates or record merges – maintenance type tasks mostly).  So in some ways, I’ve become at least one of the “go-to” people about Novell’s training programs.

The reason this is significant plays into some shifts taking place in my role at the present.  I still will handle the practicum programs, but have become more and more involved in identifying and planning the direction of what we’re doing.  I had some successes with changes in the practicum exam infrastructure (for which I credit the team that did the actual work – I really handled project management more than anything else) and my management decided that I had demonstrated some really good project management skills and an ability to take a vision that I had developed and make it happen.

They want more of that from me – which brings me back to why I decided it was time to return here and start writing again.

What I see (and I know at least some of the people I work with see as well) is that there is a shift coming in how educational materials are consumed.  My generation (and it feels weird to say that) didn’t have the ubiquitous access to a resource like the Internet that is available now; as I have watched my stepson grow up, he has never known a world without the Internet, and this is true in a very large part of the world today (certainly in the parts where an IT vendor does business).  Social media has taken off in ways that nobody could have forseen; Facebook is reportedly one of the most popular (if not the most popular) website on the ‘net, which I think shows the popularity – if not the power – of the socially-aware Internet.

Learning is inherently a social activity.  My generation learned by going to a classroom and interacting with a teacher, other students, and course materials in a way that we never really even thought about; it’s just the way things worked.

For the next generation of IT workers, the things they take for granted as “just the way things worked” includes instant access to information because of the pervasive availability of the Internet and the (literally) trillions of pages of information (some good, some bad, some of unknown quality) out there, along with the ability to access it from pretty much anywhere – be it a PC, a netbook, mobile device, or whatever.

I’ll write more in another post about where I think this leads us, but let me explain the concept of “learner-centric learning” as a bit of a “teaser” for my next post.

The old paradigm of training was focused around a classroom as a social gathering point for students to gather with a common goal:  to learn some information or skill.  An instructor would stand at the head of the class and lead the class through a predetermined path that would present them with the information it was determined they needed to acquire the information or skill they were working towards.  This is often referred to as curriculum-centric learning because the emphasis is on what is being taught to the group, and that content is pushed to the student (for the most part).

A possible new paradigm of learning is focused not around the content, but rather around the student.  With the advent of Internet-based social media and technologies like Google Wave, Novell Pulse, Facebook, and search engines like Google, Bing, and WolframAlpha, the next evolution in knowledge transfer and skill acquisition becomes a pull of the information that the student self-selects as relevant to what they want/need to know in order to complete tasks that require a certain skill.  In this new paradigm, the content becomes secondary to the idea of putting tools in place that allow the learner to effectively find the information they need and use a variety of tools to determine if they understand the information they were seeking and how to apply it.

In November, I was asked to take over our testing programs, so I’ve been working on learning an entirely new aspect of the training business.

I’m still in the process of assimilating information about testing processes, almost entirely around our registration process and partner management processes.

As nearly everyone knows (or should know), testing is an integral part of the learning experience.  From the standpoint of understanding how effective any training is, testing is used to understand the change in knowledge.  Done properly, a student should be assessed prior to taking a course and then tested after the course in order to determine what change in knowledge took place as a result of that training.

In my role in working with Novell’s instructor community, I got heavily involved in learning evaluation and metrics.  Novell uses Knowledge Advisors’ “Metrics that Matter” tool for learning evaluation in the training courses, both direct from Novell and through our training partner channel.  The guys who started Knowledge Advisors even wrote a book about their methodology, entitled Human Capital Analytics (written by Kent Barnett & Jeffrey Berk – a must read for anyone interested in measuring and improving learning – and I didn’t just take that from the cover, though it is on the cover).

Part of the MTM methodology can utilize assessments to pre- and post- test students in order to work into the calculations, which include a return on investment calculation.  The system can work things out without the testing data, but it seems to me that testing helps validate the information (at the very least) produced by the ROI report.

So while I have changed roles, my aim still is very similar to what it has been for the past three years:  To demonstrate the value of Novell’s training programs.  This is going to be an interesting shift for me, and I know I’ll be writing more as I learn more in the world of testing.

The Novell CLA is based on the content from two of the courses in the CLP10 track; courses 3071 and 3072 (SLES 10 Fundamentals and SLES 10 Administration); the third course (course 3073, SLES 10 Advanced Administration) is not part of the CLA certification. Think of the CLA as a “checkpoint” on your way to the CLP10. The CLP10 exam (as well as the more advanced Certified Linux Engineer 10) is a practical examination, and as such, it focuses on proving your skills.

Many candidates have a degree of apprehension when being asked to prove that they can do something; being able to do is dependent on knowledge, so if a candidate is uncertain about their knowledge, there is an increased fear of failing at the practical examination. The creation of the CLA was done in part to help remove some of that fear. As I said in my previous post, Linux isn’t hard, just different. I would add to that statement that because it’s different, candidates need to have some comfort in their knowledge. A knowledge-based examination and certification gives candidates increased confidence when going in to take the CLP10 practical examination.

My thanks to Mr. Vaughan-Nichols for the article and the chance to clarify my thinking on this certification.

At BrainShare, we offered exams for a total of four new certifications – the CLA,, the CLDA, the NCA, and the NCE-ES. In this post, I want to give you my (unofficial) perspective on these four certifications.

The first certification – the Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) – is an entry-level Linux certification based on Novell courses 3071 and 3072. The exam is what we call a “traditional” or “forms-based” exam.

(As an aside: Forms-based exams are useful for determining what a cert candidate knows, but not necessarily what they can do. The way I see it, there is a distinction between knowing and doing (and I think most would agree with that), but there is value in testing both capabilities when it comes to certifications. If you can do something but it takes a while for you to figure out what it is you need to do, or if you need to reference a book in order to do a task properly, that shows a lack of knowledge. Yes, you eventually will get there, but if you know the information you can perform the task more quickly. Testing for knowledge is an extremely valuable tool.

At the same time, knowledge alone isn’t sufficient in the real world – if you know the command-line parameters for the find command in Linux but can’t effectively use the tool to accomplish a task, you’ve demonstrated that you can successfully memorize facts, but there’s no test for applying the knowledge to the real world.)

The CLA is a test designed to let the candidate demonstrate knowledge, not skills. The primary focus is to let people know that Linux isn’t hard – that’s a myth. It’s just different than what they may be used to (NetWare, Windows, Mac, etc).

The Novell Certified LInux Desktop Administrator (CLDA) is based on a single course – course 3086 – and is intended to be taken by candidates looking to learn how to administer Linux desktops. It focuses on the sorts of things that users find important – software management, printer configuration, desktop configuration, and usage. The exam for the CLDA is also a traditional forms-based exam.

The Novell Certified Administrator (NCA) is an introduction to Novell services. Some who have looked at this want to equate it to the Certified Novell Administrator (or Certified NetWare Administrator, for those who have been around Novell long enough), but the goals of the NCA are quite different than the goals of the CNA. The CNA focused on administration tasks around the NetWare operating system – use of the management tools for NetWare to manage the platform.

The NCA is quite a bit broader, as Novell’s product portfolio has expanded since the CNA was developed. The NCA thus focuses on a wider range of products, but with fairly shallow knowledge in each (after all, it is a 5-day course; how much depth can get for 4 or 5 complex products in that time period?). The idea of course 2000 (and the NCA) is to give candidates a taste for what Novell’s product line consists of and the sorts of things the products can do. As with the other’s we have discussed so far, this is also a forms-based exam.

Lastly, we have the Novell Certified Engineer – Enterprise Services (NCE-ES). This is the first of the NCE certifications, and is based around Novell Open Enterprise Server 2, with a particular focus on the Linux version of the product. This certification focuses on doing rather than on knowing, so the exam is a practical examination delivered using Novell’s practicum technology.

NCE-ES is a logical progression for traditional CNE candidates coming from a CNE6 or CNE-OES background, Stay tuned for information about other NCE tracks that are being developed.

In talking with some of my friends and business contacts about the benefits of social networking, particularly as relates to business, I’ve heard opinions on both ends of the spectrum – that it’s good because you get a chance to find out what’s available out there, or just to reconnect with former coworkers and friends from the past; or that it’s bad because it’s essentially one more untrusted organization with your e-mail address and the ability to spam you. Some of my friends even consider the invitations themselves to be nothing but spam.

My own experience with LinkedIn has been that it seems to be a good thing; while I’m not looking for a new job, I have received a couple of interesting contacts with proposals for job offers – a director of developer training and support at one company, and a general “let’s see if there’s a match” from another.

At the same time, I’ve also managed to reconnect with past employers – most notably a boss whom I (regrettably) feel I burned some bridges with when I left the company. We exchanged a few e-mails, but nothing much more happened with that.

Perhaps of more interest is seeing who the people I know know – I found a former VP of mine who knew someone I attended university with (not someone I knew at all from classes, but to find someone who knows two people who attended the same small university in Daytona was a bit of a surprise). I’ve also managed to find long-lost business acquaintances, partners, and co-workers whom I thought I would not be likely to hear from again.

Most people, it seems, form fairly strong but temporary relationships with the people they work with. At my last company, I was very good friends with my boss (who was first my team lead and a coworker); we used to get together regularly for parties, have lunch together, and just chat about the state of the world while he was out on a smoke break (I’d go out even though I’m a non-smoker myself – it often was the only time I could catch him to ask for his opinion on work-related matters). Once I left the company – an amicable parting by all accounts – we never really chatted again.

I have to admit that I miss that when I think about it, but at the same time, that has been replaced by similar working relationships with my current coworkers.

So, is this newest trend in social and business networking a good thing, and if so, where should the trends go?

Personally, I think it is a good thing – not just because it’s interesting to see that in my 2nd tier of connections on LinkedIn, there are people who work for companies like Tippett Studios, DreamWorks Animation, LucasFilm, and other such notable companies (though that admittedly is pretty cool), but because in todays job marketplace, it is valuable to keep your options open – and in order to do that, you’ve got to know what’s out there.

Not long before he passed away, my father told me that if there was one thing he’d learned in his nearly 90 years on this planet, it was that giving loyalty to a company is not something that is generally going to be rewarded. He worked for the same company for around 40 years; the retirees ended up having to sue the company’s successor in order to get the benefits that they were guaranteed under the pension plan. As rapidly as companies are born and die in the modern workplace, nothing is really guaranteed these days.

In nearly 20 years of being in the workforce myself now and having worked for 8 different companies (some as the result of a merger or acquisition, but different management, policies, and processes constitutes a change in employer in my book), I’ve observed some of the things my dad talked about. The bottom line was that only you are going to look out for your best interests, and having a contingency plan in place is something everyone in the workplace should have.

Having a good list of contacts helps with that contingency – if you can go to your network and say “hey, I’m available to be hired, and I have this skill set now”, you’ll have a leg up in trying to keep that unemployment period as short as possible.

Now, with that said, there are some trends that I’m seeing in the social networking sites that need to change. First and foremost, there are far, far too many of them now. Pick one, folks, and stick with it. Personally, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn, probably because it’s the first one I joined. It’s where I update my information; as an identity management specialist, it seems very awkward to me to maintain the same set of information in multiple places, so I picked one place to keep up-to-date.

If I were to make a prediction about these sites, it’s that there will be some consolidation over the next couple of years. Some of them may integrate services (similar to the way Facebook can integrate your network on LinkedIn now). But I think some integration and consolidation is inevitable – and not at all a bad thing.

A few years back, I decided I needed to do something about what appeared to me to be an allergy problem. So, we went to our local medical center, and the answer I was given by the doctor was “here, try these pills, if they don’t work, try these pills, and if they don’t work, try these pills and this nasal spray together. Good luck!” I didn’t even get a referral to someone more qualified to perform a root cause analysis to determine why I felt so miserable.

A lot of IT troubleshooting is handled in this way as well. Some of it is a necessity, but I’m of the opinion that trying different solutions is the last thing you should do, not the first thing. To be successful in IT, you have to understand the systems well enough to fix the problems that happen so they don’t happen again.

It seems that many people coming into IT are not taking the time or making the effort to understand the systems they implement. This is something that should be taught as part of a certification program, but many cert programs don’t go into this.

When I first started teaching for Novell back in 2003, I was hired to teach the eDirectory Advanced Technical Training course. Before I taught that class, though, I had to learn a new course that had just been released, course 3007: eDirectory Tools & Diagnostics.

This course, I think, is one of the best certification courses that I’ve ever seen. I might be slightly biased, because it was the first course I taught – and was a course that taught something that I’d been doing for many, many years at that point: How to find the root cause of a problem and diagnose it.

So, just like the doctor I saw years ago, many IT professionals learn how to try several things until one of them works. In many cases, the “magic bullet” is to reboot the system and wait for the problem to happen again.

“Troubleshooting” in this way requires very little thought, but ultimately defeats the purpose of why one is hired as a professional in this field. Being professional, in my mind, means having a brain and knowing how to use it.

Now, why do I refer to troubleshooting as a “lost art”? Certainly, there is a fair amount of science (or application of scientific methods) involved in troubleshooting. Narrowing the problem down to a specific cause is a very methodical process, and done right, the same process can be used consistently and return good results.

Following the medical analogy I started with, though, there’s a bit of science involved in a diagnosis, but there’s also the application of knowledge that sometimes happens in a nonintuitive way (at least to the untrained observer) to identify what the actual root cause is. A few weeks ago, I was watching an episode of some crime program, and the beginning was a guy walking into a veterinarian’s office with what seemed to be some sort of fatal wound. The veterinarian walked over and started by saying “I don’t treat people! I treat animals!”, but he tried to do what he could. When the police showed up, they asked him questions, and he gave very detailed answers about what was wrong with the guy – dislocated shoulder, ruptured spleen, and a few other things; all this information given even though the patient couldn’t talk to him. The cops looked at him funny, and he said “what can I say? I’m used to dealing with patients who can’t tell me what’s wrong – I have x-ray hands, I guess.”

That’s the kind of art I’m talking about: Being able to diagnose issues in a system when there’s no evidence of a problem other than, say, a complete failure of something. Using an example from my own IT career, I got a call one day from the help desk saying “users can’t log into a particular server”. I was connected to the server, so I looked at a drive mapped to the server and said “well, the server’s up, send someone out to look at the workstation.” After a while, the number of calls escalated, and started coming in from other parts of the company: Clearly something was wrong, even though all these servers were up. It turned out that the authentication system on the system had deadlocked, and that didn’t prevent access for those already logged in, but for those who were just getting started, it meant they couldn’t do anything.

3 days of troubleshooting ensued, and it turned out to be a bug in the code for an update we’d just applied – a one in a billion chance of it happening, and we just got lucky – the right amount of load on the servers, the right number of users logging in, and the right distribution of services across the servers in the environment.

For those familiar with Novell’s NDS product and with my writings on Novell’s Cool Solutions and in the support forums, you’ll know that my least favourite way of troubleshooting a directory problem is to start running repairs. Troubleshooting requires finesse, not brute force. This is true for any technology, not just directory technologies (though I might argue that for directory technologies, it’s more important to not use brute force to fix problems one doesn’t understand because of the distributed nature of the technology). Take some time to understand the problem, particularly if it’s a serious problem. While your users will likely not thank you for not getting the system running immediately after a failure, if you can isolate the problem and fix it for good, they will appreciate that the system isn’t going down again.

This isn’t to say that a band-aid solution is never appropriate: Sometimes, you’ve just got to get the thing back up and running as quickly as possible. The financials server has crashed, and the quarterly sales figures are due today. Not much you can do about that, if rebooting the system is going to get the system running so the finance people can get their work done (which might be work that is required by, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US).

Just don’t leave the band-aid on. If you’ve ever left a bandage over a wound for longer than you should have, you’ll understand what I’m saying here.

As someone now involved in Novell’s certification programs, this troubleshooting aspect is something that I’m happy to say there’s some traction for in the certification paths. Troubleshooting and optimization – the latter of which I may write about in a later post – are two key points of discussion as we design the new paths. It simply isn’t enough to just be able to install and manage the system, you’ve got to be able to fix it when it’s broken.

That’s one of the things they pay you the “big bucks” for.

Just like in the doctor’s office – a GP might tell you to try a handful of different drugs in order to treat the symptoms, but a specialist (such as the very good allergist I saw about a month ago) is going to actually do some diagnostic work and determine the actual root cause before prescribing a treatment – and that treatment is going to be targeted at that root cause rather than the symptoms.  The specialist may not be able to give you good news all the time (as in my case – a course of 3-5 years of allergy shots was the resulting prescription), but the chances of the problem being solved for good are much better.

John is a fairly quiet guy; he’s got a degree in computer science, and interests in math and music.  Like a lot of people starting in IT, he’s not sure exactly where he wants to go or how to sell his skills to potential employers.  Part of the reason for this is that he doesn’t believe he knows anything special that would merit him getting a new job.

One of the things to keep in mind when looking for a job in IT is that all companies need IT infrastructure people these days.  Because of this, you don’t want to limit your options to just, for example, software companies (because that’s where you think of the technology being) or even companies that are in the high-tech industry.  Your local grocery store has some IT infrastructure, and they need someone to manage it, design it, and maintain it.

One thing that surprised me a little during the discussion with John about some of the larger employers in his area was that one of them – a large consulting firm – is something he ruled out because he doesn’t see himself as a good fit for doing consulting work; he doesn’t like working with people, and doesn’t want to be caught between unreasonable customer expectations and sales promises.  Those of us with some experience in the field will have seen the cases where sales says a product can do anything you want, and the consultant coming in and providing a much more limited – and realistic – picture of what it is that a product can do.  John doesn’t want to be the one stuck having to explain that sales oversold the product, and for some people, that’s a reasonable thing to want.

But ruling out any job at the company because they were a consulting company struck me as a little odd.  It turns out that John had learned that one of the things they do is provide outsourced systems management to large clients, so he assumed that they would use those same people to manage their own systems.  He was very surprised to learn that this is likely not the case, as a few of us pointed out to him.

Billable resources (which is what consultants are) are the product that a consulting company sells.  A consultant being billed out at, say, $100/hour to do systems management for a Fortune 50 company is going to be more valuable to the company as a billable resource (that is, a resource that is essentially a consumable product – ie, the consultant’s time) than managing the infrastructure used to run the business.  To run the business, the company might hire a $30-$40 per hour worker.  The revenue generated from the billable resources in the field (ie, the consultants) is going to be what pays both for the consultant and for the non-billable resources that run the company.

Taking a $100/hour resource and dedicating them to several hours a week of managing the systems for the consultancy results in a loss of income that would be used to both pay the consultant and to pay for the IT worker – it’s a double hit for the company to use the resource in that way.

The bottom line is this:  Never assume what a prospective employer’s needs are – that’s up to them to decide.  If your skills are “programming in any number of languages, but not C” (as John’s are), don’t assume that as a programmer you’re worthless to them because “any real software shop is going to require coding in C”.  Fill out the job application, send in a resume/CV, and see what sticks.  Part of the process of getting a job is to put feelers out in as many places as possible and see who bites – it’s kind of like fishing:  Some days you’ll get a nibble, and some days you won’t.  But if you don’t even cast a line into the water, you’re guaranteed never to catch a fish.