The value of Product Certification
During this week Technical Leadership Exchange, attendants could take up to three product certification tests for free. On day 1 I decided to take the “Developing WebServices with Rational Developer 6.0” exam since it was a topic I was quite familiar with. I found the exam to be pretty easy, specially considering the fact that many questions were related and that some questions provided the answer to others.
The same day I passed that exam, one of the members of my team failed the “DB2 version 9 fundamentals exams”. That was totally unexpected, since he is an experienced Information Management IT Specialist. I decided to take the same test the next day to find out how hard the exam really was. Just for the record, most of my database experience has been working with Informix. I am a DB2 certified professional but I took the exam four years ago with version 7.1 and I have never installed or used DB2 version 9. To make thing worse, I had to complete the exam in 45 minutes (instead of 90) because I was running late for dinner. So, how did I do? Not extremely well, but I was able to pass the exam.
So, how is it possible that I could pass the exam while a more experience engineer failed. One explanation is the test’s heavy focus on SQL. Despite being called DB2 fundamentals, few questions are really DB2 specific. Anyone with a solid SQL knowledge can obtain a good score even without having used that particular database engine. That is a serious problem, we cannot expect employers to know the contents of a particular exam. We should expect the title of the certification to clearly describe the skills being tested. However, that does still not explain why an experienced professional can fail such a test. The answer is quite simple, English fluency. Most product certification tests tend to be quite confusing with many answer options looking very similar. That is fine if English is your primary language, but not for those who are not fluent in English.
I feel that this is unfair. Although I do not care much about product certification when evaluating candidates, many managers do. Candidates who do not speak English well are being double taxed, first when being evaluated on their foreign languages skills and later when asked about their technical skills. Now that I am thinking about it, I wonder if the fact that a country like India is known for the technical skills of it’s people this is due to the fact all students speak English and therefore have easier access to technical information. Having lived in many countries around the world I can tell you that, in my experience, stupidity is evenly distributed and so is intelligence.
So, what is the solution? For starters, product certification tests should be available in multiple languages. This shouldn’t represent a large effort for companies such as Cisco, IBM or Sun. I am convinced that if this happened, the number of certified engineers in regions like Latin America, Europe and Asia would rise dramatically, unveiling new business opportunities in countries that currently are not seen as investment worthy.
However, that is obviously not enough. Universities in non-English speaking countries should acknowledge how key the proficiency in English is to their student’s success. Unfortunately, in many countries national pride is preventing government from taking serious actions. This is too bad as it is taking away opportunities from people that truly deserve them.