[ILUG] LPI certification

[Bill Quinn]

Morning ILUG,

I think there are two separate answers to the questions.

The first is to certify against no certification. Certification is a
benchmark of skills. It is a useful filter to demonstrate that a minimum
skill-set has been reached. Typically when we are recruiting we seek
certification with experience. Part of the interview process is always a
demonstration of skills.

In the UK, certification is being driven by two needs. Firstly, we have
had a large number of redundancies in IT. People are viewing
certification as a way to differentiate themselves from their
colleagues. Secondly certification is being driven by tenders - to win
this business you need a skill-set which comprises of these
certifications. 

The second part of the question is why LPI? LPI has the largest number
of certified individuals in the world - Last count over twice as many
LPI certifications as Red Hat. 

The key advantage of LPI Certification is that it is vendor neutral. It
teaches both the Red Hat and Debian based distributions. How many
organisations use a mixture of distributions? You may start with a
particular distribution, but in later years the business may change.
>From experience I percieve the market in Ireland to be very different to
the UK, there appears to be a greater willingness to utilise community
versions of Linux compared with the in the UK.

As others have said a Certification program also takes you out of your
comfort zone, teaches you areas that you might not be familiar with or
had considered previously.

Hopefully this answers peoples questions, if they would like a wider
answer please get in touch. Or I will be at the OSSBarcamp in April
where I am happy to discuss this further.

Bill Quinn
Programme Director
LPI-UK



On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 10:30 +0000, Thomas Pedoussaut wrote:
> John O'Neill wrote:
> > Thinking of doing the above certification as a first step in beefing
> > up the Cv a bit. Anyone got any experience with it?
> >
> > Is there anyone who could let me know how it would look from an
> > employers point ?
> >   
> I'm currently preparing for 102 (having passed 101 in September).
> >From a consultant prospective, it's usually a good foot on the door to
> get you contracted for a 3 days job.
> If you're talking about full time employment, either it makes you pass
> the first round of CV selection, which means the company has no clue
> what it means if they discriminate candidates around that, or it can
> also make the tiny difference between 2 candidates of equal level.
> It's also a good way to force you studying / practising stuff you
> normally don't do in the very current role but are useful like say quotas.
> 
> -- 
> Thomas