IT Accreditation?
Australian IT – ACS pushes own IT ‘license’.
Here are some excerpts from the above article:
THE Australian Computer Society (ACS) has called on government to support its bid to become the accreditation agency for the IT profession, making membership mandatory for computer staffers ranging from Microsoft Certified Engineers to high-level project managers.
Information Technology and Communications Minister Helen Coonan has been supportive of the plan to introduce accreditation processes into the IT industry as a means of better managing risk, and applying “downward pressure” on professional indemnity insurances costs.
So, what does everybody think? Do we need some form of accreditation in our industry?
They have it in other industries (eg: Accounting for two, they have their CPA [Certified Practicing Accountant]and CA [Chartered Accountant]). Is accreditation good for the industry?
I know that there are some brilliant programmers out there who would probably not qualify to be accredited, and there are probably those who are just shoddy programmers but would probably qualify just due to the fact that they completed their university course (with low marks throughout…).
Ok, it isn’t just programmers that this will target, it’ll target all IT professionals.
Perhaps this is a way to try win back management after all the frights from the dot-com crash?
A way to say, hey, we’re not all bad.
On a semi-related note, check out this post by Michael Lehman on programmers being endagered species.
From Michael’s blog:
During the “dot com” era there were, and I don’t think there’s much disagreement within the industry about this, many people who suddenly became “developers” due to their desire to hitch a ride on the IPO bandwagon. Anyone who could write a little HTML and cut-and-paste some JavaScript advertised that they were â€web professionals”.
Are the people Michael described as, who could write a little HTML and cut and paste JavaScript the types we are trying to keep out by having a form of accreditation? [Should point out here that i'm just using those people as an example.]
Should the accreditations be categorised?
Eg: Developer, Network, Help Desk Tech Support, etc…?
Update: Here are some reader opinions posted on the Australian IT website.
October 18th, 2004 at 11:37 pm
This is wrong. As you say, all the wrong people would qualify. Besides, I hate clubs
October 19th, 2004 at 12:23 am
I was not trying to say those people needed to be excluded but rather I’m advocating (in a small way) for “truth in advertizing”.
My point was that you can’t build polished, professional, mission-ciritcal software without a certain amount of real-world experience.
So, as I mentioned, some companies failed due to lack of people with that experience and therefore the amount of that kind of experience is a resource constraint.
October 19th, 2004 at 11:02 pm
Sorry Michael, I was just using that quote from your blog as an example.
I wasn’t implying that you were suggesting that, but I just had a thought that those are the types of individuals that the proposal may be trying to keep out of the industry.
But in the end of the day, the recruiter/employer still needs to judge the potential employee on their merits during the interview. But even that is perhaps not enough, and sometimes it is going to be a gamble.
I actually think that this may go ahead, maybe not now, but it will happen sometime in the future in my opinion.