A Parallel Postsecondary Universe:

The Certification System in Information Technology

Clifford Adelman

Senior Research Analyst

Office of Educational Research and Improvement

U.S. Department of Education
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U.S. Department of Education

Richard W. Riley

Secretary

Office of Educational Research and Improvement

C. Kent McGuire

Assistant Secretary

National Institute on Postsecondary Education,

Libraries, and Lifelong Learning

Sandra Garcia

Acting Director

Media and Information Services

Cynthia Hearn Dorfman

Director

October 2000

The findings, conclusions, and opinions in this monograph are those of the author, and do not

necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Department of Education.

To obtain copies of this report (while supplies last) or ordering information on other U.S.

Department of Education products, call toll-free 1–877–4ED–Pubs (877–433–7827) or write

Education Publications Center (ED Pubs)

U.S. Department of Education

P.O. Box 1398

Jessup, MD 20794–1398

TTY/TTD 1–877–576–7734

FAX 301–470–1244
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Contents

Executive Summary v

Introduction: Breaking Predictable Boundaries 1

“Secular” Realities 2

Why We Should Care 3

First Signs and Traces 4

IT Certifications: the Basic Universe 7

Playing by the Numbers 9

The Providers 11

What it Costs 16

Certification Agents: the Testing Companies 18

The Assessments: Think You Can Pass? 19

Beyond the Vendor: Generic IT Certifications 23

Quality Assurance: Standards and Accreditation 24

Coming Soon to a Campus Near You? 26

Building a Pipeline 28

Summary: the New Global Guild 30

Information Needs for National Planning Everywhere 31

References and Sources 33

Appendix A: Three Interacting Platforms 40

Appendix B: Two Indicators of Global Reach 43
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A Parallel Postsecondary Universe:

the Certification System in Information Technology

Executive Summary

This report describes a new system of credentialing that has arisen in the information

technology and telecommunications industries over the past decade. It compares this system

to traditional higher education, identifying both similarities and dissimilarities, and points to

some cases in which the two interact. Among its findings:

General

• Both corporate vendors and industry/professional associations have created over 300

discrete certifications since the first such credential (Certified Novell Engineer, or

CNE) was issued in 1989.

• Approximately 1.6 million individuals worldwide earned approximately 2.4 million

information technology certifications by early 2000. Most of the certifications have

been earned since 1997.

• About half of those who earned certification did so outside the United States, but we

know very little else about the backgrounds and demographic characteristics of those

certified. Indirect evidence, however, suggests that the age distribution of this group is

dropping and that the proportion without bachelor’s degrees is rising.

• About one out of eight job advertisements in information technology now mention the

certifications, not as requirements for hiring, rather as a “plus” for applicants. In

contrast, one out of five advertisements indicate that degrees are required.

Examinations

• Information technology certifications are earned by passing examinations administered

by third parties. Three corporations administered over 3 million examinations in 140

countries in 1999.

• A large industry has arisen to prepare candidates for these examinations. This

industry includes organizations (including some traditional colleges and universities)

that provide course work, Web sites that offer tutorials and practice examinations, and

a mass of self-study books and CD-ROMs.

• Examinations are constantly updated to reflect the current state of knowledge and

practice, and to maintain certification, individuals must take the new examinations and

engage in continuing professional education.

Course Work and its Providers

• While formal course work is not required to prepare for certification, the volume of

offerings and providers worldwide is considerable.
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• Most providers are not part of the universe that reports data on enrollments,

credentials awarded, faculty and staff, etc. in the annual postsecondary data collection

of the U.S. Department of Education.

• Some higher education institutions have been active participants in the certification

programs, with models of collaboration ranging from linking “challenge examinations”

to credits, incorporating multiple certifications into bachelor’s degrees, and awarding

their own certifications based on curricular packages purchased from for-profit

developers.

• The entities that provide the course work are authorized to do so by the sponsor of

the certification, which ensures that course content and quality of instruction meet the

sponsor’s standards.

• Instructors who lead the course work must themselves be certified both in content

areas and in teaching and assessment practice.

• The industry has established a Council on Computing Certification to develop

standards for accrediting certification programs.

Costs of Certification

• Costs vary by certification program and the extent to which candidates take formal

course work from different types of providers. Examination fees range from $50 to

$1,000 (the latter for hands-on laboratory performance exams), and some

certifications require five or more examinations.

• The limited information we possess suggests that employers cover the costs of

certification for over half of the candidates.

Summary

The summary section of this report emphasizes the major themes of the certification system

and its relationship to higher education:

• The system is global and operates in many languages.

• The student, not the institution, is at the center of the system.

• The system has brought competency-based education and performance

assessment to a status they have never enjoyed within traditional higher

education.

• Certifications replace neither experience nor degrees, and the IT system does not

pretend to be higher education.

The summary also indicates the critical need for more information on certification candidates

and providers of course work, since the new system is now large enough to play a role in

state and national planning for postsecondary education.
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Introduction: Breaking Predictable Boundaries*

While hardly any of us who work in the traditional system of higher education noticed, a new,

parallel universe of postsecondary credentials sprung up in the 1990s. One can see it now in job

advertisements, on the Web, and in the financial markets: an educational and training enterprise

that is transnational and competency-based, confers certifications not degrees, and exists beyond

governments’ notice or control. And it is much bigger than we imagine.

**1. In matters of post-compulsory schooling, we grew up and work in a world of traditional

and predictable boundaries. We have universities, colleges, community colleges, and trade

schools, all accredited by one recognized association or another, all granting credit hours and

traditional degrees or certificates, all participating in the Federal student financial aid system, all

reporting data on enrollments, degrees, staffing, salaries, and so forth to the U.S. Department of

Education through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Even if these

institutions offer virtual instruction, credit-by-examination, and other variations on the delivery

of knowledge, they are still recognizable parts of the American postsecondary system.

2. The for-profit University of Phoenix is part of our comfortable world. So is the virtual

Western Governors University. University College of the University of Maryland, with

outposts in a dozen countries and distance delivery that reaches two dozen more, is one of us.

Programs carried out by higher education institutions in concert with corporations that provide

content (e.g. Novell), corporations that provide virtual delivery systems (e.g. Caliber Learning

Network), and corporations that provide both (e.g. IBM), are our programs (Marchese, 1998). In

all these cases, course work and credits as we historically have understood them are at the center

of the transaction between student and program, and one party in the provision of learning offers

the standard currency of higher education.

3. When national policies on post-compulsory schooling are formulated, the unit of analysis

has been—and still is—the government-recognized college. From the 1960s through the 1990s, 

most countries assumed that these institutions would bear principal responsibility for developing

new programs and new delivery systems that would serve the greater numbers of students

coming forward for tertiary-level education. These policies were built on economic models of

what could, would, or should happen given changes in demand.

* Note: A shorter version of this monograph, with the title, “A Parallel Universe: Certification in the

Information Technology Guild,” appeared in Change, vol. 32 , no. 3 (May/June, 2000), pp. 20-29.

** Note: Paragraphs/sections are numbered to facilitate citations. See “References and Sources.”
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4. Since 1972, when the Higher Education Amendments changed the fulcrum of funding in

the United States from the institution to the student, the growth and change of our colleges,

community colleges, and trade schools has been driven principally by demographics, and, to a

lesser extent, by adjustments in financial aid formulas and practices. These are technical—and not

fundamental—engines. They can be plugged into economic models. Indeed, the literature on

access to higher education is full of such modeling.

5. Quite suddenly, all this seems old-industry, old-think. A new class of postsecondary

providers has come on the scene—boundary-breaking and border-crossing every step of the

way—to scramble institutional and governmental assumptions about the future. In higher

education’s fascination with the likes of for-profit degree-granting institutions such as the

University of Phoenix or DeVry Institute, and with virtual degree delivery, it has been looking for

challenges in the wrong direction. In a real sense, the operative economic models have been

superceded by a “secular” development.

“Secular” Realities

6. When economists speak of a “secular” trend, they refer to changes that occur for reasons

that lie outside classic economic models. The “secular bull market” in equities that we have

witnessed since the mid-1990s occurred not because stocks were oversold and the models called

for a technical upswing. Rather, the market gained momentum because the managers of a majority

of equity mutual funds acknowledged a reordering of the engines of economic growth, a burst in

productivity as a by-product of technological advances, and a change in the very metrics and

range of valuation.

7. Simultaneously (and not coincidentally) worldwide secular economic developments

changed the context for post-compulsory schooling and its interactions with the labor market

(Stacey et al, 1999). Foremost among these developments was the emerging dominance of

information technology and telecommunications as the engines of knowledge itself—let alone

commerce. These two interlocking industries required a borderless system of protocols that could

increase productivity in all participating economies. They also required a labor force to create,

advance, and administer those protocols across national boundaries, a labor force with loyalties to

occupations more than to specific organizations (Zabusky, 1997). This labor force had to meet

standards of knowledge and the skillful application of knowledge that could apply in all countries

and a dozen major languages. Thus a new international guild was born.

8. Thus, too, was a secular, competency-based system of certification of individuals

established within this information technology guild. The student, not the institution, is the

nucleus. Around that student the guild formed a network of standard setting organizations, de

facto accrediting procedures, schools and other knowledge distribution entities, a learning support

industry, and corporate agents devoted to assessment (including assessment of faculty for the

schools). Weaving that net is a workforce of curriculum developers, testing specialists, academic

advisors, review panels, and designers of distance education delivery.
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9. Unlike traditional degrees in the U.S. (but very much like degrees in most European

countries), the industry standard certifications in information technology are awarded by third

party examination, with the principal examining agents operating at 5,000 sites in 140 countries

and administering an estimated 3 million assessments in 25 languages in 1999. There are general

field certifications, sub-field specialty certifications, requirements and electives, hierarchies of

credentials analogous to the associate’s, bachelors, and master’s levels, and the equivalent of

academic societies with their annual conventions matched to each. There are even pre-collegiate

junior certifications, acting as gateways to the equivalent of college majors. As of January, 2000,

the end of the first decade of its existence, this system had awarded at least 1.8 million

credentials. Six months later, the count was over 1.9 million.

10. Are there “institutions” in this world of information technology (IT) certification? Yes.

But few are among the 9,632 found in our national Directory of Postsecondary Institutions

(Barbett and Lin, 1998). The majority are secular, too. They have arisen outside our usual model

of postsecondary education.

Why We Should Care

From one perspective, the new world described here seems confined to the realms of continuing

education and workplace training. It seems to have little to do with those of us who play

instructional, administrative, custodial, policy, or analytic roles in higher education. Why should

we care?

11.1 First, because our economy exhibits a voracious demand for IT workers in a wide

range of occupational categories (U.S. Department of Labor, 1997), and, it is claimed, the U.S.

system of education isn’t producing them (ITAA, 1998). Beyond those earning formal degrees

earned in IT fields, though, U.S. college students have considerable potential to fill part of the gap

(Adelman, 1997), but the industry looks to the global labor market to fill its needs. That strategy

has built-in limits, given public policy concerns about trade, immigration, and intellectual

property.

11.2 Second, an industry in need of workers can and will offer incentives, including the

reduced opportunity costs of earning credentials other than college degrees—and in a much

shorter period of time than that required by degrees—that lead quickly to high starting salaries. If

the certification of competence in information technology and telecommunications assumes a

status like that of degrees in the global economy, students will respond.

11.3 Third, the emerging system of learning opportunities, assessment, and certification

is now of sufficient magnitude that we cannot ignore it in institutional, state or system planning.

The demographic “tidal wave” we anticipate rushing at our traditional institutions may turn into

little more than a splash if students increasingly opt to participate in a system beyond our ken,

and partake of higher education in patterns of attendance that elude our tracking systems

(Adelman, 1999).
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11.4 Lastly, some colleges and community colleges are buying into and participating in

this parallel universe, mixing certifications with degree offerings and serving as agents of both

vendor-specific and industry-generic IT preparation. In so doing, they are importing cultures of

performance assessment and quality assurance that up to now have been foreign to most

collegiate faculties. Comfortable ways of doing business may inevitably be challenged from

within.

First Signs and Traces

12. This report on industry certification emerged indirectly from an exploration of

community college/labor market interactions through posted criteria for hiring in entry and midlevel information technology jobs. The early phase of this study involved a content analysis of

IT job ads in the Sunday “Technology Employment” classified section of The Washington Post.

The Post is an extremely rich source, particularly as the Washington, DC metropolitan area now

ranks in the top 10 as a market for high tech workers, though precisely where in the top 10

depends on who conducted the survey and how the universe of “high tech workers” was defined

(Behr, 1999). Classified ads are good unobtrusive data, the kind loved by historians, biologists,

and anthropologists everywhere! They are the footprints on the forest floor, far more reliable

than surveys. Between April of 1998 and April of 1999, I read over 3,500 discrete job postings

covering an estimated 20,000 technical positions other than those specifying senior status or

more than five years of experience. To determine the reliability of these observations of the

language used in the Post advertisements, another 350 job postings in the San Jose Mercury News

(serving Silicon Valley) between February and April of 1999 were subjected to the same analysis.

To determine the durability of these observations, approximately 300 job ads in The Washington

Post during March, 2000 were also examined.

12.1 The content of the advertisements was sorted into five category bins: degrees/

credentials, amount/types of experience (including job tasks and industry), specific software,

programming, and operating systems expertise, general technical skills, and non-technical skills.

The language of each content area was scanned for dominant and distinctive features.

12.2 As table 1 demonstrates, only 21 percent of these advertisements mentioned a

formal degree as a criterion of employment. A small number of entries cited specific course work

(but not degrees) in computer graphics, physics, and “higher math,” implying that course work

can be a proxy for competence. Some notable entries went out of their way to diminish the

importance of a traditional credential with such phrases as “4 years technical experience in lieu of

degree,” “BS preferred but experience counts more,” and “2+ years of programming experience

preferred but [emphasis added] college grads considered.” As a recruiter at a high tech career fair

held in Chantilly, Va. in July 2000 remarked: “I am not going to take a $50,000 risk on some

dropout tinkering with motherboards in a garage who my boss says is a genius: the degree

diminishes the risk somewhat, but experience reduces it immensely because experience generates

evidence of what you can do in an organization.”
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Table 1.—Education Specified in Postings for Entry and Mid-Level IT Positions,

“Technology Employment” Section, Sunday Washington Post, April 1998 through

April 1999

Number Percent

Master’s Degree 13 0.4%

Master’s Preferred 27 0.8

BS in CS/MIS/EE/CE 206 5.8

BS + Industry Certification 17 0.5

BA/BS Required 98 2.8

BS Preferred 47 1.3

BA or Equivalent Experience 73 2.1

Associate’s in IT-Related Field 37 1.0

Sub-Baccalaureate Certificate 43 1.2

“Degree” (unspecified) 184 5.2

No Degree Mentioned 2799 78.9

13. For a position requiring fluency in HTML, Java, Perl, C++, and UNIX the applicant was

asked to “Forward URLs of prior design work,” and nary a word about degrees appeared. This is

a true performance assessment. No resume. Send us your URL. We’ll log on and observe your

communications skills, your technical skills, your knowledge, your artistic sensibilities. If we are

good assessors of performance, we may even make some measured inferences about your ability

to discover contexts for and to solve unstructured problems.

“Multi-threaded development” was a common demonstrable competence required of these jobs:

the creation of a software stage for interactions where some actors must wait, others must be

notified, and the players don’t all talk at the same time (see Brogden, 1999, p. 173). When one

thinks carefully about it, the criteria for creating both workable URLs and the mini-dramas of

programming involve some of the same kind of reasoning skills higher education says its seeks to

develop regardless of major. And designing transactions in client/server environments is very

much like identifying logically-related events (with no extraneous material) in many other

disciplines. In fact, when degrees were mentioned in the job advertisements, the fields were not

confined to computer science, management information systems, and computer/ electrical

engineering. Others mentioned included music, linguistics, history, physical sciences,

mathematics, museology, journalism and English (for technical writing positions). The masters of

the information technology universe understand a great deal about where intellectual muscles can

be developed.

14. A basic competence-matrix, one that combines “years of experience” with knowledge of

both generic and specific systems and software, dominates the presentation of jobs in the

classified ads. This competence-matrix, as we will see, is also embedded in the course offerings of

the new secular providers, where the notion of “prerequisites” is as likely to include prior

experience as prior coursework. The “degree structure” of some industry certifications follows a
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similar routine: to progress from “Associate” to “Master” (in Cisco’s certification system, the

levels are labeled “Associate,” “Professional,” and “Expert”) requires years of experience in

addition to passing examinations in discrete knowledge areas. When the International Webmasters

Association’s “Standards of Practice” defines “knowledge” as “informed understanding of the

subject matter of a member’s field of practice or employment, based on education and

experience,” and “technical competence” as “knowledge and the skillful application of

knowledge,” it makes explicit what we see in the job postings. The data of table 2, drawn from

analyses of the job advertisements, puts these dimensions of competence together in the area of

programming languages.

Table 2.—The Competence Matrix in IT Job Postings for Entry and Mid-Level

Positions: of 3,500 Ads, the Number Specifying Programming Languages

Years of Experience

1 to 2 3 to 4 5 Open Total

Programming Languages/Software

C++ 33 20 40 158 251

Visual C++ 10 7 5 66 88

Java, Java Script 38 20 19 197 274

SQL 36 20 6 114 176

PERL 8 9 0 76 93

HTML 10 7 12 56 85

Cold Fusion 7 15 4 27 53

Other & Combinations 135 200 86 525 946

Totals: 277 298 162 1219 1966

Note: SQL=Structured Query Language, a standardized language for requesting

information from a data base.

PERL=Practical Extraction and Report Language, an interpretive text

processing language.

HTML=Hypertext Markup Language, the current standard authoring

language for creating documents on the World Wide Web.

15. In about 40 percent of the posted jobs for early career positions, then, what the industry

wants to know is not merely whether you can write Java and Java Script, but how long you have

been practicing. The combination is a sign to an employer that you are ready for the next step,

whether in programming, operating systems, servers, networks, or Web development. The next
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step is the certification of competence, the moment at which your acquired knowledge and skills

are benchmarked.

16. Beyond the type of requirements reflected in the competence matrix, the ads often cited

what to me, at the time, were strange abbreviations

“You must . . . hold (or be actively seeking) CCDA [Certified Cisco Design Associate]

certification.”

“You should possess (or be able to achieve) CCNA [Cisco Certified Network Associate]

certification with a strong desire for CCIE [Cisco Certified InterNetworking

Expert].”

“CNE [Certified Novell Engineer] a big plus.”

While the language seems a bit hesitant, as if it were reflecting an emerging phenomenon, these are

instances of the IT industry’s formal certifications of competence. Some people who hold these

certifications are not so hesitant, however. The signatures on more than one of the

communications received in the course of researching this topic were in the form,

“John Doe

 MCSE, Master ASE [Compaq]”

The acronyms are not puffery. They are evolving into professional markers, a reflection of the

way in which the occupants of technical positions increasingly see their “expertise and

contribution to the work process . . . within the professional division of labor” (Nelson and

Barley, 1994, p. 22).

IT Certifications: the Basic Universe

17. As Microsoft’s home page for certification notes, the difference between a certificate and

the courses you might take lies in the former’s attestation to benchmarking. Table 3 reflects the

presence of IT certifications in job postings:

Table 3.—Count of Desired Industry Certifications Specified in the Portfolio of

3,500 Information Technology Job Advertisements, April 1998-April 1999

MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) 96

ODBA (Oracle Database Administrator) 95

CNA (Certified Novell Administrator) 77

CNE (Certified Novell Engineer) 64

Cisco Certifications 28

Other Certifications 100
8

Among the “other” certifications mentioned?

ASE Accredited Systems Engineer (Compaq)

PSS Certified Professional Server Specialist (IBM)

RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer

CLP Certified Lotus Professional Application Developer

MCSD Microsoft Certified Solution Developer

MNS Master of Network Science (3Com), with 5 specializations

A+ (PC support service) Computer Technology Industry Association

and dozens more. There are certifications in programming, network management, training, and

telecommunications, certifications from specific vendors and generic certifications from industry

associations. Christianson and Fajen’s helpful 1999 guide to certifications describes nearly 300 of

them (a decade earlier, then was only one, the CNE), and this universe was dated by the time

Christianson and Fajen went to press! Brainbuzz.com (a site for assisting people preparing for

certification examinations) listed over 350 certifications by mid-2000, and the “Certification

Watch” for June 2000, marked 11 new certifications. The woods of certification are coming to

resemble the forest of bachelor’s and associate’s degrees delivered in over 1,000 fields by over

3,000 institutions of higher education and in which (as notices in The Chronicle of Higher

Education attest) a half-dozen trees are planted weekly.

18. Across the roughly 3,500 job advertisements, one out of eight mentioned an IT industry

certification as a preferred background for employment. To garner a preliminary indicator of

change, I returned to the Washington Post Sunday “Technology Employment” sections in March

2000, and found roughly one out of seven. Within a few years, perhaps one out of five will do

so–the same ratio as we currently find for formal postsecondary credentials (though formal

degrees are usually requirements, not enhancements).

19. This growth will come from the supply side. As Christianson and Fajen document, more

than 50 major corporate vendors, IT industry associations, and large intermediary “training

partners” such as Learning Tree (which reports serving 113,000 IT students) have formally

established criterion-referenced standards for what it takes to perform at an optimal level in

various parts of the information technology and telecommunications worlds. Another 7,500

corporate vendors with global workforces recognize these standards. When you hang out a

criterion-referenced sign, you are providing a public set of educational objectives and a supplyside opportunity. In a learning society such as ours, people reach for those objectives, and

employers feel free to encourage a proxy for attainment.

Some certifications thus function like degrees. Other certifications function like licenses in that

they require renewal. For example, after one receives the mantel of Certified Internet Webmaster

one must work at the role for two years and complete 30 hours of continuing education to qualify

for recertification. In all Microsoft Certified Professional programs, as exams are retired and
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replaced, one is required to take the new assessments to remain certified. Novell adds

examinations as the state of knowledge changes, and in unmistakably uncompromising language:

“All CNE certified individuals are required to pass the exam for either course 529 [Netware5

Update] or 570 [Netware5 Advanced Administration] by August 31, 2000. Failure to do so will

result in loss of CNE status.”

Playing by the Numbers

20. How many IT certifications have been issued? Initially, it was hard to come by the

numbers because there is no central registry; and the data one can extract from various press

releases, examination preparation books, and Web sites do not yield unduplicated headcounts.

Most (though not all) vendors and industry associations, however, are pleased to provide the

information when asked directly. Table 4 summarizes what one can obtain from them (only

Microsoft provides other than rounded numbers); it excludes the kind of certifications offered to

end-user office workers who demonstrate proficiency in software packages. The Microsoft

Office User Specialist (MOUS) certification, in three levels (general, expert, and master), is the

best illustration of what is excluded.

Table 4. Headcounts of Information Technology Certifications as of 2000

Headcount Date or Source

Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) 521,639 June 14, 2000

Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) 27,427 June 14, 2000

Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) 279,745 June 14, 2000

Other Microsoft Certified Professional Programs 218,841 June 14, 2000

Certified Cisco Design Associate (CCDA) 4,000* C&F, 1999, p. 24

Certified Cisco Internetworking Expert (CCIE) 4,996 July 31, 2000

Other Cisco Certifications 26,000* Late 1999

Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) 175,000 Late 1999

Certified Novell Administrator (CNA) 370,000 Late 1999

Other Novell Certifications 18,300 Late 1999

Oracle (all certifications) 24,000* Late 1999

Certified Info Systems Security Professional (CISSP) 1,500 C&F, 1999, p. 46

Citrix Certified Associate (CCA) 8,000 August 1999

A+ (Computer Technology Industry Association) 150,000 November 1999

Other Computer Technology Industry Assoc Certifications 15,600* June 2000

Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals 50,000 July 2000

Natl. Assoc. of Communic Systems Engineers (all Certifs) 18,000 February 2000

Others (Baan, Sybase, SAP, Adobe, etc.) 43,778 Martinez, 1999

TOTAL: 1,936,826

Note: C&F = Christianson and Fajan; 1999; *=unduplicated headcount estimate.
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21. The 1.9 million certifications (not people, but certifications) we know about is probably

two-thirds of the iceberg, particularly as some major U.S. players (Sun, IBM, Compaq) are not

accounted for. This is a global industry, these are worldwide figures, and if Microsoft’s data on

MCSE’s and Cisco’s data on CCIE’s are any indication, about half of the major certifications are

awarded to individuals outside the United States. As for growth, consider: there were 35,000

MCSE’s awarded by the fall of 1997 and 280,000 by June of 2000. For the more rarified MCSD

(Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer), the numbers rose from 3,000 to over 27,000 in the

same period. And during the same period, too, the number of discrete certifications available from

all sponsors increased by 200 (a veritable doubling of options).

22. Is there any way of estimating an unduplicated headcount? Microsoft reported an

unduplicated headcount of its own certifications at 719,129 in February 2000, or 81 percent of

its total number as of that month. But that figure seems oddly high in light of surveys

(Microsoft’s included) that show 50 to 60 percent of the candidates walking into examination

rooms already hold at least one IT certification (sometimes from another vendor). In a 1997

Gartner Group survey of 7,000 certification candidates cited by Martinez (1999), the proportion

seeking their first certification had dropped to 31 percent (from 56 percent in 1994). The

percentage might seem extreme, but the trend is credible.

Allow some license in light of these varying estimates: I will ballpark worldwide certifications at

2.5 million and unduplicated headcount at 65 percent of that, or more than a year’s production of

bachelor’s and associate’s degrees in the U.S.

23. More global and unobtrusive ways to reckon growth in potential certifications lie in

examining the volume of offerings of courses that prepare individuals for certification—or, when

available, indirect indications of actual enrollments. Even those very oblique methods

underestimate activity in a field full of autodidacts and self-study materials (the Library of

Congress holds 233 exam preparation books and study guides for the MCSE alone), and in

certification specifications in which coursework may be recommended, but usually not required

because the industry knows how much can be learned by experience and self-study. In

Microsoft’s 1997 salary survey of a sample of its certificate holders, 98 percent indicated selfstudy as a preparation method, with 91 percent using books. And in a 1998 study by the Gartner

Group (cited by Martinez, 1999) 43 percent of 6,000 certification candidates indicated self-study

as their primary preparation method. College course work was last on the Gartner list, but other

classroom training (from the vendors themselves) was ranked much higher.

24. In an attempt to access course enrollments as a potential indicator of future certifications,

I entered a query at the Cisco Web site for all course offerings by either Cisco or its training

partners in the year 2000 that were part of the certification preparation sequences. The answer:

“3,822. Please narrow your search!” If only five people show up to each class, these 3,822

offerings could prompt nearly 20,000 cases of course taking.
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25. In a more finite illustration, consider the offerings for a five-day (40 hour) course in

Advanced Cisco Router Configuration, one of the core courses leading into CCNA (Cisco

Certified Network Associate) certification. During the two-week period Jan. 23-Feb. 3, 2000,

this course was offered at 75 locations in 20 countries on four continents and in ten languages

(English, Chinese, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and

Turkish)—and in all cases by providers other than traditional institutions of postsecondary

education. The introductory CCNA course, a 40-hour Web-based production, is delivered

continuously in English from 12 servers in the U.S., UK, Germany, Austria, Russia, and Brazil,

and by Cisco “training partners” Global Knowledge, Ascolta Training, Getronics UK, Mentor

Technologies Group, Azlan Limited, Multireded Informatica, Sequoia Networks, and others.

None of these partners was in the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) as

of 1998. Because these training partners exist outside government reporting systems, we have no

idea how many people actually attended these course offerings.

26. Oracle provides a rare window into enrollment volume. When one clicks on the

registration page for an Oracle course offered directly by Oracle, and indicates preferred

geographic region and time period, the response is a listing of sites, dates, and number of seats

still open. For example, in the month beginning February 21, 2000, and for the five-day

foundations course, Introduction to Oracle: SQL [Structured Query Language], 75 classes were

offered in the continental United States. As of February 17, eight of those classes were sold out,

and another 19 had five or fewer seats open. Assuming a mean class size of 20 and subtracting

the listed open seats, 780 people were enrolled for that one course during that one month period.

Annualized enrollment: 9,360. Would all these people pass the Oracle SQL test and proceed on

toward certification? No. But the numbers give us an idea of demand for this knowledge.

Some of Cisco’s training partners in countries outside the U.S. present the same type of window.

Between May and August of 2000, the Softnet Learning Center in Buenos Aires, Argentina

offered 30 courses on 11 Cisco topics with a capacity of 12-16 students per course. As of May

24, 172 seats had been filled and two courses (both given in May) were closed. Latin America is

now the fastest growing Internet market, and requires a home-grown workforce to serve the

infrastructure. Seats such as these will be claimed.

The Providers

27. Who provides preparation for industry certifications? And what are the quality assurance

mechanisms? These are critical questions for the fastest growing information economies

worldwide. The certifications are portable, and the providers must be recognized across borders

by common standards.

28. Last year, an enterprising reporter for the Washington Post Magazine toured traditional

postsecondary institutions in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to see who was providing

programs that might lead to the various IT certifications (Taylor, 1999). She found that the

community colleges and the less-than-4-year proprietary schools carried the largest proportion of
12

potential certificate candidates, though these institutions were not very likely to deliver

instruction over the Internet. At the same time, the public 4-year extensions (dominated by the

University of Maryland’s University College) registered the highest number or both degree

candidates (in Computer and Information Sciences) and on-line offerings. But without course

content analyses we can only guess who, among those attending traditional postsecondary

institutions, might be preparing for industry certification.

29. Beyond the list of institutions the Post reporter presented, though, I found another 12

regional commercial providers through advertisements, 10 on-line providers and international

technology training firms such as Global Knowledge, and eight education divisions of major

vendors that offered classroom instruction in the Washington area. Collectively, the added group

presented explicit preparatory curricula for no less than 37 vendor and industry association IT

certifications. Without them, the count of providers has not even begun.

These “secular” providers are distinguished from colleges, universities, community colleges and

trade schools by:

29.1 Operating outside Title IV of the Higher Education Amendments and the Integrated

Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). To repeat: they do not participate in the federal

student financial aid and reporting systems. We thus know little about their students.

Furthermore, the type of background information they collect from students is not the type one

finds in IPEDS-derived tables in the annual Digest of Education Statistics.

As a new student to Sun Microsystems Education Services, for example, you are asked only for

name, social security/passport number, address, phone numbers, employer, and profession. If

you fill out Sun’s personalized training needs survey, you add job title, job description, prior

certifications, desired certifications, a self assessment of your strengths and weaknesses in

information technology, and a set of ratings on what you believe to be most important to you and

your organization’s success. No race, sex, age, prior schooling, or any similar questions we ask

under the IPEDS roof. The international IT guild cares most about personal and organizational

competence. The registration form is the same in every country, every language.

29.2 Operating outside the formal postsecondary education accreditation system. They

are a-accredited. Up to this point, accreditation has not been in their mission or concept of

quality assurance. Instead, the primary vendors (Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, Novell, and so forth) or

industry associations (International Information Systems Security Consortium, the National

Association of Communications System Engineers) establish standards, and themselves act as de

facto accrediting bodies when they authorize other entities to serve as “training partners” or

“authorized education centers.” In August 1998, for example, Sun Microsystems entered into an

agreement with New Horizons Computer Learning Centers under which 25 New Horizons

locations offered Sun-developed Java courseware from its certification curriculum, and, critically,

agreed that New Horizons instructors would train for, receive, and maintain certification by Sun
13

(an arrangement illustrating the centrality of teaching quality in the IT certification world). In

July of 2000, 24 of those locations were still Sun-authorized.

When the IT certification system turns to something resembling accreditation, it will be carried

out within its own borders. This development is already underway, with the establishment of a

Council on Computing Certification in May 2000 (see sections 62 and 63 below).

29.3 Operating with a faculty judged solely on the quality of its teaching (“quality”

including currency and depth of subject matter knowledge). Instructors at these “training

partners” are certified as knowledgeable in the curriculum and as skilled in instruction in ways

that no traditional accrediting body would demand. The Chauncey Group, a subsidiary of ETS,

provides the principal generic certification of technical instructors, the CTT (Certified Technical

Trainer), through both a computer-based examination and a performance assessment video-tape;

and there is a growing business in workshops and boot camps to prepare candidates for the CTT.

The major vendors also offer separate certifications for instructors, with an expectation that the

instructor must first hold one or more of the content certifications offered by the vendor (in

1998, for example, 55 percent of the Microsoft Certified Trainers [MCT] also held the MCSE).

The evaluation of these individuals does not include research activities, community service, or

participation in institutional governance. Teaching is everything.

29.4 Operating under different criteria for “admission” than traditional postsecondary

institutions. These criteria range widely, but none of them involve the ritual presentation of high

school records and test scores required (even if they are not used) by colleges, community

colleges, universities and proprietary degree-granting institutions. Unless participation is

restricted to employees of an organization or agency, the secular world is largely an open door

world. There are exceptions, of course.

If one wishes to work toward a UNIX certification (UNIX system certifications come under

many guises) and takes the preparatory program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s

“Graduate School,” one begins with a 5-day (7 hours per day) Introduction to UNIX System V.

The prerequisite? “Familiarity and confidence with computer hardware and software concepts.”

Period! In contrast, CyberLearning offers an 80-hour fast-track MCSE program restricted to

“experienced networking professionals and university IT and Engineering seniors and graduates

only” and a 172-hour MCSE program for which “college degree [is] desirable.”

If one starts out on the path toward the generic Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) designation

through prosofttraining.com, and wishes to skip the 5-day Foundations course and move directly

into the coursework for CIW specialist certifications such as those for Site Designer or Enterprise

Developer, one can present a passing score on CompTIA’s i-NET examination instead. In other

words, concrete evidence of one level of competence becomes the generic form of prerequisite in

this guild, and the equivalent of “credit by examination,” at least at the introductory course level,

is becoming a more common practice.
14

30. Some of the seculars are for-profit; some are divisions of corporations and public agencies

that charge tuition and are expected—at a minimum—to break even. What kinds of organizations

fall under the umbrella of these “seculars”?

31. Public Agencies: I have taken courses at two of these: the Center for Information

Technology of the National Institutes of Health and the USDA Graduate School. The former

restricts enrollment to the NIH “computing community” (federal employees, contractors, guest

workers, visiting scientists, research collaborators and their staffs). “Admission” is by

recommendation and support of the student’s employing agency, i.e. one does not need a degree

(or even a high school diploma) to study mainframe or statistical package programming at NIH.

In 1998, there were approximately 11,000 applications, 10,000 acceptances, and 6,200 actual

registrations for CIT courses. The seat time for these courses lasts anywhere from 2 hours

(Introduction to Disaster Recovery) to 35 hours (the basic C programming course). If you sought

to master the SAS statistical program, you would be in the computer lab classroom for four

courses and 42 hours, plus 3-4 hours of practice for every classroom hour. Despite the demands

of course work—and the quality of instruction from a staff that is largely volunteer—CIT has no

relationship to the formal higher education sector. None of the curriculum is submitted to the

American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service for college credits or

Continuing Education Unit (CEU) equivalency.

32. The USDA Graduate School has been around for a long time, and its presence in

delivering preparation for industry certification in information technology fields is not

insignificant: in 1998, its Center for Applied Technology clocked 12,644 registrations (again, not

an unduplicated headcount, and of which 2,061 were in courses that prepare one for IT

certifications), including those of employees of federal agencies, states, cities, federal contractors,

international organizations, other countries—and walk-ins from everywhere, including high

school and college students. While the USDA Graduate School offers its own certificate programs

in business, computer and information systems management, and languages other than English,

students can enroll for individual courses without committing to a program. CEUs are awarded on

request, and college credit arrangements are brokered by ACE’s College Credit Recommendation

Service.

33. Primary Vendors: These are the Microsofts, Oracles, Novells, and Ciscos. In addition to

designing the curricula and writing the examination specifications, they are all in the directprovision business. Sun Microsystems, for example, does a lot more than deliver on-line

ergonomics instruction to its employees through its Intranet Sun Microsystems University. Its

Sun Educational Services division offers over 200 courses in classroom, Web-based, and CD

modes, and with no restrictions on who can register. Pick your country! A Chinese menu pops

up, or a listing of las fechas y horarios for the course, “Desarrollo de componentes JavaBeans” in

Mexico City. France? Register by December 1 and “un coffret de 3 bouteilles de Champagne

Cuvée An 2000 vous sera remis!” In Beijing, Buenos Aires, or Boston there is a Sun office with

trained and certified employees who serve as instructors at either the office itself or rented

locations.
15

34. Training-Partners. This universe includes large multi-national for-profits such as Global

Knowledge, Azlan and New Horizons, and local for-profits in other countries, e.g. Suntek

Information Systems in Korea and Dr. Materna in Germany. None of these are subject to

regulation under the Higher Education Amendments, and given their global operations, they

obviously prefer to stay that way. Some of them are not in the direct provision trade, rather

specialize in reconfiguring curriculum for on-line or CD-based instruction. They thus function as

intermediary vendors.

35. As an example of intermediary reconfiguration, NETg provides 700 on-line modules for

IT training programs at the National Institutes of Health, including eight devoted to the

background curriculum for Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) certification, 28

that will set you up for Cisco certification exams, over 100 co-developed with Oracle Education

(the majority devoted to database administration), and an “Internet Masters Series” (HTML,

TCP/IP, JavaScript, web site security and administration) developed with Netscape. NIH bought

600 licenses for this collection, augmented by a circulating library of self-study guides, a measure

of expected volume of use.

36. SmartForce, another “e-learning” secular, takes the concept several steps further by

adding on-line mentors to its on-line courses, a library of laboratory simulations, threaded

discussion forums on particular vendor products or generic developments in the IT industry, and

the chance to interact with guest speakers on a pay-per-view basis.

37. Some training partners have developed their own certification programs, but the

certificates awarded, like those of community colleges and colleges, do not hold the same status

as those granted by vendors and industry associations. Learning Tree International, for example,

will dub one a “certified professional” in Cisco Router or Oracle7 Database Administrator on

completion of course work (minimum of 22 days and $4,500 for Cisco; 19–24 days and $4500

for Oracle) and passing allied examinations (Learning Tree, 1999). These certifications are

recommended for 10 college credits by ACE’s College Credit Recommendation Service, but they

do not mean either that a successful candidate is certified by Cisco or Oracle or that a particular

college will award 10 credits.

38. “Secondary” vendors. “Secondary” does not imply a small corporation, rather a limited

presence in the IT certification world. Citrix Systems, a major producer of software for serverbased computing, grants the Citrix Certified Administrator (CCA) with two tracks. Preparatory

course work is available through “Citrix Authorized Learning Centers” (CALCs), e.g., the secular

Emergent Online, of Reston, Va., will prepare students for the MetaFrame Administration track

in a 4-day course offered 13 times between October 1999 and June of 2000, for $1,895. New

Horizons will perform a similar service in Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, New York City, San

Antonio, San Francisco, and St. Louis. As of August 1999, approximately 8,000 CCAs had been

awarded (see table 4).
16

39. The secondary vendors seem to be more subject to rationalization in the industry than the

major vendors. For example, Christianson and Fajan indicate that Open Market, an e-business

application software developer, offered a certification called “Folio 4 Certified Infobase

Engineer.” A search of Open Market’s website in January of 2000 yielded no reference to this

certification, let alone to Folio. A trip around the Web revealed that by the time Christianson and

Fajan published, Folio software products had been acquired by a specialist in Internet publishing

technology called NextPage, and that NextPage also assumed control of Open Market’s

“LivePublish” software. While training courses in the use of all these products were offered, the

certification had disappeared from the radar screen.

Banyan Worldwide (formerly Banyan Systems) had issued approximately 900 certifications in

network administration and design by the end of 1998, and less than two years later,

discontinued its network operations. No doubt those certified will seek other credentials in the

networking field. This is an industry that doesn’t sit still long enough to be measured. It is also an

industry in which technical professionals don’t sit still, either.

40. Corporate Universities: By the most recent count of their informal association, the

Corporate University Xchange, there are over 1,000 such entities, all but a handful (for example,

the Tennessee Valley Authority University) private. Unless they are IT principles themselves,

e.g. Sun Microsystems, they are not in our universe, principally because (a) most of them

outsource their IT training, and (b) that training appears to be limited to end office user software.

Even Motorola University does not directly offer preparation for IT certifications.

Data on curriculum, enrollments, and other traditional measures are very generalized in the

corporate university world. We get lots of information on structure, philosophy, development,

and organizational processes (Meister, 1998), but very little on anything else. We get pert-charts,

not syllabi or sample examinations such as those offered by IT “training providers” and primary

certification vendors at their Web sites. In its IT certification role, the education and training

service division of IBM, for example, sets out 17 certification “road maps” similar to curricular

advisories in highly structured college majors, along with detailed course outlines and sample

examination questions. The typical corporate university seems to regard such information as

proprietary.

What It Costs

41. Where there is a market, there is a business, and industry certification in IT is no

exception. It doesn’t come free, and the costs of preparation for certification vary widely by the

source and delivery method of training, and the country in which the training takes place. Table 5

indicates the typical range of both advertised (by the for-profits) and computed (from catalogs)

tuition for instructor-led preparation programs in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. The

ranges exclude out-lyers (for example, there is one secular provider that offers different forms of

MCSE preparation with prices from $3,950 to $7,950 depending on a student’s background and

sponsorship).
17

Table 5.—Range of Advertised and Computed Tuition for Selected IT

Certification Preparation Programs at Both Traditional Postsecondary and

Secular Providers in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area, 1999

Advertised* Computed**

Certification Tuition Range Tuition Range

A+ $500-700 $800-1200

MCSE 1400-2700 1600-6500

CCNA 1000-1750 1600-6500

ODBA 1300-1600 1500-4000

Web Developer 1500-2500 1800-4500

* In the Sunday Washington Post “Technology Employment” section.

** Capped at 10 credits for any certification preparation program, since 10 seems

to be the standard recommendation for IT certification packages by ACE’s Credit

Recommendation Service.

42. These estimates are considerably lower than what it would cost you, starting from

scratch, to acquire the requisite knowledge and skills prior to a special certification preparation

program. A 10-day instructor-led first course in Java, direct from the source (Sun

Microsystems), is priced at $1,600; a 5-day Java2 course for those who have either passed the

introductory course or who can write basic programs in C or C++ is priced at $2,000 in

instructor-led format or $1,000 on a self-paced CD-ROM. There are three more courses in the

foundation Java sequence when you take it through Sun. The bottom line is about $7,500 (and

that’s cheap compared with Martinez’ high-end estimate of tabula rasa-to-Certified Internet

Webmaster at $20,330, including examination fees, self-study manuals and CDs).

43. In contrast, the Ziff-Davis on-line ZD University/SmartPlanet offers 23 self-study Java

modules for a total of $658.90; the on-line SmartForce offers 15 Java modules (that it estimates

take four hours each to complete) for a total of $1,875; and at Learning Tree one can apply a

$4,995 four-course training packet to a 17-day instructor-lead Java sequence that can be worth

nine college credits through ACE’s service.

Do you get what you pay for? Unlike such questions in higher education, the variables one would

array in an evaluation include job experience, the nature and intensity of self-study, prior formal

course work, and the usual intangibles involved in determining the worth of a class-based

experience. There is no clear answer because the populations are inaccessible (one cannot conduct

research or evaluations in the Parallel Universe in the same ways as are available in the traditional

higher education sector).

44. Financial aid in the IT certification preparation world is available principally in two

forms. First and foremost, by employer sponsorship. In 1999, Novell surveyed 135 North

American companies that employed Novell-certified staff and found mean per head direct
18

sponsorship costs (training classes, travel, testing) of $3,121 and indirect costs (lost employee

time) of $1,933. Microsoft’s 1997 salary survey of its professional certificate holders revealed

that employers picked up the full preparation tab for 57 percent of the survey respondents (but

a third of the respondents had footed the whole bill themselves). Despite year-to-year volatility

in this survey’s reported mean costs of certification (instruction, examination fees, books, tutorial

CDs, etc.), the proportion of respondents reporting “full-boat support” from employers has

been consistently in the 50-60 percent range. But these are limited hints: no one is tracking the

full universe of certification preparation in terms of tuition reimbursement or contract learning

paid directly by employers to providers. Since employers in other countries are included among

the sponsors, and since some of the certifications originate in other countries (SAP in Germany;

Baan in the Netherlands), estimates are even more elusive. The National Center for Education

Statistics’ National Household Education Survey is insufficiently detailed to get at this

information for U.S. citizens.

The second potential source of support, in the U.S., lies in the new Hope and Lifetime Learning

tax credits, but it will be some years before we know precisely who has used these tax credits and

for what.

Certification Agents: the Testing Companies

45. The international guild system of information technology requires intermediary agents for

certification. There are three testing companies that play major roles: Prometric (recently

acquired from Sylvan Learning Systems by Thomson Corporation of Canada for $775 million),

CatGlobal (a division of Houghton-Mifflin), and Virtual University Enterprises (VUE, a division

of National Computer Systems). They are in the business of testing competence from everything

from PowerPoint to C++ to the elements of the Citrix CCA and those of the major industrycertifications (MCSE, ODBA, etc.).

46. The global accessibility of these companies is stunning. Prometric operates about 2,500

testing centers in 140 countries. VUE has nearly 1500 locations, including 20 in Mexico, 28 in

Russia, 23 in Brazil, 19 in South Africa, 50 in China, and others in Senegal, Kenya, Oman,

Namibia, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Angola, Albania, and Honduras—among other places. CatGlobal

offers wholly on-line computer-based testing from servers in 16 countries, and takes mobile

testing centers to vendor expositions (in 1999, it administered 2,600 certification exams for Lotus

at European expositions alone). Some of these testing “centers” are located at the sites of

“training partners,” presumably for convenience, and some are free-standing.

Because most of the assessments are delivered by computer on a daily basis, and because the

candidate encounters a randomized selection of prompts from an item pool, test security

standards meet the requirements of any client (vendor or industry association). An organization

that wishes to establish itself as an authorized testing center for any of these corporations must

undergo comprehensive and rigorous evaluation, particularly on test security and proctoring

issues.
19

47. These organizations are key to any would-be accounting system of industry certification.

Nobody else has as comprehensive knowledge of how many students attempt to pass which

certifications, how many actually pass, and the distribution of attempts and successes by

country in which the testing takes place and the national origin of the test-takers. But because the

universe of testing companies is an oligopoly, they all regard this type of information as

proprietary.

48. The testing, of course, is not free. A given certification may require as many as eight or

nine examinations, the fees for each of which range from $50 to $250 (lower if the examinations

come from an industry association and you are a member of that association). In CompTIA’s

pricing scheme, the fee to an employer falls with the volume of employees taking the

examination. Pricing of examinations outside the U.S. varies widely by world region and vendor.

For performance assessments with hands-on laboratories and simulations, the prospective

examinee should count on $1,000. If one completes assessments on any three tracks of the Cisco

Certified Internetworking Expert program, each of which requires both a paper examination and a

laboratory performance, the total examination fee bill comes to $3,300.

The Assessments: Think You Can Pass?

49. What kind of examinations are these? First, they all have cut-scores. Similar to licensure

rules in law, medicine, architecture, and nursing, this is a “no pass/no play” world, though “no

play” in this case means only that one does not have access to the higher salaries and the support

services of the guild that certification brings. Like the Bar exams, too, one may retake the

certification tests, with an appropriate wait between test administrations.

Second, the formats of the examinations range from 45–120 minute restricted response (multiplechoice, identification, one best correct answer, 2/3/4 correct answers), to restricted-response

adaptive modes (that stop the testing process at the point in the adaptive curve at which a

passing score could be predicted at a 95 percent confidence level), constructed response (e.g. drag

and drop), and “essays” (e.g. “Write a program in X to do Y” or “Write a technical report/press

release explaining M to audience N), to three-hour simulations, scenarios with “select-and-place”

items, and case studies involving performance benchmarks.

Even within restricted response formats, some examinations are very creative. Cisco’s Certified

Design Associate (CCDA) examination, for example, presents stories about organizations that

require a wide area network (WAN), and a combination of drag-and-drop, identification, and one

best answer questions require the candidate to apply design knowledge in the context of the

stories.

50. The Red Hat Certified Engineer Exam is a six-hour laboratory affair, including two and

one-half hours performing an installation and configuration of a system, and two and one-half

hours debugging system problems. A core Linux operating system firm, Red Hat was the only
20

vendor-certifier I found that indicated passing rates on examinations: 60 percent for the

performance-based Red Hat Certified Engineer exam, on which the cut-score is 80. As table 6

demonstrates, 80 is at the high end of passing scores on IT certification examinations.

Table 6.—Passing (cut) scores on a sample of certification examinations in information

technology

Red Hat Certified Engineer 80

Certified UNIX System Administrator 80

Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert, Lab Exam 80

Certified Internet Webmaster 75

Sun Certified Architect 75

Disaster Recovery Institute International Certifications 75

BAAN Basic and Advanced 75

Master of Network Science (3Com) 70

Certified Information Systems Security Professional 70

Sun Network Administrator 70

Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert, Paper Exam 65

Sources: Christianson & Fajen, 1999; Martinez, 1999

51. The most demanding certification is probably the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert

(CCIE) assessment which, in addition to a two-hour written exam, requires a two-day lab exam

that “pits the candidate against difficult build, break, and restore scenarios.” Those in higher

education who talk glibly about performance assessment don’t really know what it means until

they are up against the CCIE. On the Web site for current and prospective Cisco certified

experts, one student advised others to work through the Internetwork Troubleshooting and

Internetwork Design examinations before “attacking the real monster, the CCIE.”

52. As in the case of high-stakes gateway examinations in the traditional higher education

system, a considerable industry has arisen to assist prospective IT certification holders prepare

for the examinations. Exclusive of the coursework provided by the vendors, industry

associations, training-partners, and postsecondary institutions, a massive amount of printed exam

preparation manuals, self-study CDs, and dedicated Web sites (certifyexpress.com, selftrain.com,

exampractice.com, gocertify.com, cramsession.com, IT2002.com, netcraftonline,com, and others)

form the core of support. The user should verify the credentials of the site. An on-line service

that sells flowers and health advice in addition to certification preparation is probably one to

avoid.

Unlike the competitive environment for access to elite undergraduate institutions or to “top” law

and medical schools, the spirit of the IT certification industry involves cooperation and sharing.

The most revealing indication of this phenomenon is the “braindump,” a Web site at which
21

prospective examinees seek—and others provide—sample questions and problems that will help

them prepare. Here are two typical exchanges:

? I am preparing for the Sun Certified Programmer. Please send questions as many

as you have . . .also tell me about recommended reading material.

ÿ What will happen if you compile/run the following code?

1: public class Q21 2: {3: int maxElements; 4: 5: void Q21() 6:

{7:maxElements=100; 8:System.out.printIn (maxElements); 9: } 10:11: Q21(int i)

12: {13: maxElements=i; 14: System.out,printIn(maxElements); 15: } 16: 17:

public static void main(String[] args) 18: {19:Q21 a=new Q21(); 20: Q21(999);

21: } 22: }

Think about initialization [of variables], compilation errors, print output.

? Hi friends. I plan to write the Sun Java2 Certification. Please send brain dumps,

related web sites, question papers. . .

ÿ What will be the output [of the following]?

public class Test {public static void main(String args[] { StringBuffer a=new

StringBuffer(“One”); StringBuffer b= new StringBuffer(“Two”); Test.swap(a,b);

System.out.printIn(“a is “+a=”\nb is “+b);}static void swap (StringBuffer a,

StringBufferb) {a.append(“more”); b=a; } }

Check this site: http://www.software.u-net.com/javaexam/

The answers to the questions are not the point: rather both the sense of community implicit in

the sharing, and the instructional talents of the respondents, who posed their questions as

unrestricted response (open-ended) prompts. To be sure, sharing may be a form of self-interest,

because the more people who acquire the level of competence required for certification the better

the communication across the industry. The people involved in these exchanges may wind up on

the same design team.

53. With very minimal knowledge and study, I have taken practice pre-tests on-line for the

A+ certification, the MCSE, and Web Developer, and, with correspondingly little difficulty,

managed to flunk all of them. The experience drove home the most basic principle of IT industry

certification: content counts! One cannot get by on interpreting verbal clues in prompts. You

either know the “stuff” or you don’t. And you must study—hard. Responses to Microsoft’s

1998 salary survey revealed that those who earned the MCSE in the previous year spent an

average of 216 hours preparing for their certification exams. The Microsoft Certified Trainers

(MCTs), who must be recertified annually, spent an average of 222 hours preparing.
22

54. Given the global reach of IT certification, some examinations are available in languages

other than English, but that depends on subject matter. Java, for example, is not written in

Japanese, Spanish, or Russian. One might prompt an examinee to solve a Java problem using a

language other than English, but without a modicum of English, the examinee cannot read or write

the Java text. On the other hand, for example, the field of document imaging is symboldependent, not language-dependent, and CompTIA’s examination for Document Imaging

Architect is available in some languages other than English (and when it is not available in a local

language, candidates have an extra 30 minutes to complete the test). In between are simulations

which, as Microsoft notes, “are used more often in English exams,” but can be incorporated into

exams in “selected languages.” When languages are “selected,” they tend to be major. CompTIA’s

exams, for example, are offered in Spanish, German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, and

both simplified and “traditional” [Mandarin] Chinese.

A global guild is sensitive to linguistic diversity, even when the technological supradialect of

English is the language of its superstructure. From the perspective of traditional higher education,

this awareness and concern with language environments should be one of the most attractive

features of the information technology guild. It’s not that certification requires bilingualism

(though in many cases, it does), rather that the learning and assessment processes are

linguistically inclusive. In the last half of the year 2000, Cisco’s training partners, for example,

are offering preparatory coursework for technical certifications in 19 languages other than English

(see Appendix B).

55. The testing firms do not award the formal certifications. Rather, they report examination

results to the vendors or industry associations that issue the documents of certification, and both

vendors and industry associations may have requirements for certification beyond those of

examination. Nor do the testing firms write the examinations or determine test content and

specifications. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), for example,

maintains a board of Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who write test objectives, new test items,

and regularly conduct what’s known in the psychometric trade as “content representativeness

studies” to ensure that certification examinations are current with the state of knowledge and

practice. Certification tests in the IT world are constantly being retired and replaced to meet the

current state of vendor products and industry knowledge. As of January 2000, Microsoft had

announced the retirement and replacement of 27 of its certification examinations. Compared to

modal behavior in the world of higher education (the Graduate Record Examination Board’s

subject field test in Computer Science has not undergone a major content representativeness

study since 1982!), these standards are rigorous.

56. I found a few exceptions to the firewall on test volume data, one of them perhaps

inadvertent: a Prometric press release of March 10, 1999 indicating that, since the inception of

the first IT industry certification a decade earlier, Prometric had delivered more than 2.1 million

examinations for Novell alone. When a representative of Virtual University Enterprises estimated

worldwide test volume for the entire industry in 1999 as 3 million (half outside the U.S.), the

Prometric press release number did not appear outlandish.
23

57. Another exception came from the 8,500-member National Association of Communication

Systems Engineers (NACSE). NACSE offers four generic certifications (two for technicians and

two for “network specialists”). Its examinations, monitored by a board of standards, are delivered

on-line by a small testing service firm called Web University, and administered by partner

institutions (including colleges) which provide the computer labs and the proctors. As a nonprofit organization, NASCE does not regard test volume data as proprietary information. Bob

Kile, its Director, reported 1999 test volume in four “disciplines” as follows:

Network & Data Communications 6,400

Telecommunications 950

Web Issues 4,600

Programming 425

This distribution reflects larger industry patterns: networking certifications are more important

than others as labor market entry and advancement points, and Web-related certifications provide

entre to positions in a wide array of both commercial and non-profit organizations.

Beyond the Vendor: Generic IT Certifications

58. NACSE does not stand alone in the accounting of IT certifications other than those issued

by vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco or Novell. The Computer Technology Industry Association

(CompTIA) and the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals (ICCP) are notable

certifiers who have nothing to sell. As Christianson and Fajan note, their “vendor-neutral”

certifications, “cover many products and concepts,” are “developed by a wide range of experts in

a particular field,” and “encompass a [broad] range of skills and abilities.”(p. 528)

All vendor systems, for example, face the potential of crashes and “disaster recovery.” Disaster

recovery is, to use a conscious oxymoron, a generic specialization. Such specializations are

similar to those in academic fields. So it is not surprising that we have an industry organization

called the Disaster Recovery Institute (DRI) which has developed three levels of international

certification in Business Continuity Planning. And with the increasing sophistication of hackers

and virus originators, it was inevitable that the System Administration, Networking, and Security

Institute (SANS) would launch a security certification program (including Web-based training), as

it did in July 2000.

59. Another example of vendor/association collaboration is Novell’s Certified Internet

Professional (CIP), a credential developed in concert with the International Webmasters

Association (IWA), the Association of Web Professionals, the Australian Web Developers, and

the Association of Internet Professionals. There are five “tracks” in the program–Internet

Business Strategist, Web Designer, Intranet Manager, Web Developer, and Internet Architect.

Eleven (11) core courses support preparation on those tracks, and only one of the eleven,

“Netware 4.11 Administration,” is truly vendor-dependent (Novell). Separately, the IWA offers

a Certified Web Professional designation available only to its 14,000 members (93 chapters in 31

countries, from Cambodia to Venezuela). In addition to examination in at least one of seven “Web
24

disciplines” (the list is slightly different from that of the Novell CIP, in which IWA also

participates), the CWP requires two years of qualifying job experience.

60. Beyond vendor/association collaboration lie joint vendor certifications. The most notable

of these is the new “Certification Initiative for Enterprise Development,” a cooperative

undertaking of IBM, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. This

effort is described on Sun’s Web site as “a multi-vendor Java technology training and certification

initiative,” and illustrates how a broad segment of the information technology industry recognizes

and codifies the ties that bind. The key tie, in this case, is Java.

61. Increasingly, too, we find “cross-vendor recognized” examinations, a development that

underscores the rationalizing trends in the industry, along with the competition for trained labor.

Microsoft, for example, waives its networking examination requirement for those who are already

certified by Novell, Banyan, or Sun as network engineers, specialists, or administrators. Novell

waives its networking technologies exam requirement for those who already hold the MCSE

(Microsoft) or Network+ (CompTIA) certifications. Intel exempts holders of CompTIA

certifications (A+, Network+,and i-Net+) from its Technology Essentials examination (the

relationship between the specific CompTIA certification and exemption depends on the track of

the Intel certification for which one is a candidate). In the new Certification Initiative for

Enterprise Development, the Sun Certified Programmer for the Java Platform examination is

recognized by all corporate participants. In a way, these developments suggest that IT

certifications ultimately prove to be generic. They are like piano concertos: practice one well, and

you can learn the next one more easily.

Quality Assurance: Standards and the Accreditation of Certification Programs

62. The cross-vendor recognized examinations are a prelude to the adoption of industry-wide

certification standards and accreditation, for, as one training Website noted, “certification has

gone to new heights in confusion.” In a response to the rapid expansion in the number of

certifications, lack of uniform differentiation between levels of certification, and the desire to

ensure that the certification is a meaningful credential, a Council on Computing Certification was

formed in May 2000, and has distributed draft guidelines for both industry standards (including

testing, currency of certification, continuing education/experience requirements, and support for

practitioners) and accreditation of certification programs.

Unlike the construct of “program” in formal tertiary education, the IT certification “program”

does not necessarily include an instructional provider. The proposed standards apply to the

certifying agency, whether that be a corporate vendor (e.g. Microsoft), a broad-based industry

association (e.g. CompTIA), an association of specialists (e.g. the Disaster Recovery Institute),

or an educational institution that offers its own certifications (e.g. Learning Tree).

Under the proposed standards, all of these certifying organizations will be required to submit

evidence of “a clearly stated domain [and sub-domains] of coverage” with identification of all

subsumed issues, tasks, and knowledge, as “developed by technically qualified individuals,” and
25

with a name for the certification that “accurately reflects this domain” (a kind of truth-in-labeling

requirement). The certification itself must “require passing at least one exam” on which “75

percent or more of the identified sub-domains must be reflected” (a content-representativeness

requirement). Furthermore, the certifying organization must review and update both the domain

and examination content on at least an annual basis, and have in place a method for “assuring

currency of skills.” There are also requirements for support of certification candidates, modes of

disseminating information about changes in requirements, and content of program materials. And

under the proposed standards, a program cannot require membership in a specific organization as

a prerequisite.

63. The proposed accreditation requirements seek to validate these standards for a “fully

operational” program, and sort the certifications into levels. This last requirement is a very

important step because it introduces an industry-wide “degree structure” that is currently

practiced by only a few certifying agencies (Cisco, Compaq, IBM). The draft specifications for

the three proposed levels of accreditation are worth quoting (in a slightly different format than

presented by the Council on Computing Certification) because they demonstrate an alternative,

performance-based way of thinking about a hierarchy of credentials:

Level I. The domain must be limited to a single technology or skill area, and the

certification candidate should be able to:

• accomplish basic tasks in the domain without assistance;

• solve common problems within the domain;

• assist in more advanced tasks; and

• Describe the technical structure of the domain.

Level II. The domain must encompass either multiple technologies/skill areas or a

complex single technology, and the certification candidate should be able to:

• serve as a resource for others;

• solve moderately complex problems without assistance; and

• perform advanced tasks within the domain.

Level III. The domain must encompass multiple technologies or skill areas, and the

certification candidate should be able to:

• troubleshoot complex problems;

• confidently traverse the scope of the domain, from the most basic material to

complex issues involving interfaces outside of the domain;

• present “significance experience”; and

• complete a hands-on assessment/lab exam/project.
26

In a way, these levels translate into analogues of Associate’s, Bachelor’s, and Master’s

degrees–at least in the context of one’s major field of study. At the least, they are distinct

benchmarks on a continuum of competence from novice to expert. But accreditation in the

traditional postsecondary sector is focused on the institution, whereas these criteria derive from

student learning and performance. Would our colleges and community colleges be willing to adopt

this type of criterion in their accreditation procedures? As the IT certification preparation

universe moves into the traditional tertiary sector, we may yet find out.

Coming Soon to a Campus Near You?

64. The traditional computer science major covers a number of topics that students can use in

the course of preparing for IT certification, for example, Java programming, networks, and

relational data bases. What about students who are not computer science majors? The limited

background data available on certification-holders (only from Microsoft, and through its annual

salary surveys) offer two complementary, common-sense trends that might guide traditional

institutions of higher education that contemplate entering the certification preparation market in

more comprehensive ways than fragmentary course offerings. First, the age distribution of

certificate holders has moved decidedly lower: from 44 percent under the age of 35 in 1996 to 58

percent in 1998. The second change is more dramatic: the proportion holding less than a

bachelor’s degree jumped from 19 to 37 percent in the same period. The potential for helping 20-

something students complete both degrees and certification is obvious—provided that

institutions of higher education are willing to place certification in the same category as any other

program of credit-by-examination, and to adjust residency requirements accordingly.

65. Where and how has the IT certification package been translated into the standard currency

of the credit system with or without the intervention of ACE’s Credit Service? Our evidence is

anecdotal, but the large-scale anecdotes such as Pima Community College District’s arrangement

with Novell, Microsoft and other vendors illustrates what can transpire. Pima has become a de

facto accreditation agency for 170 sites (including its own) at which preparatory instruction for

certification is delivered. Called the ITCAP (Information Technology College Accreditation

Program) network, and existing as a separate corporation, it offers students at approved centers

the opportunity to turn certification preparation into degree-additive credits through challenge

examinations. These examinations were developed by Pima faculty and are scored by Pima

faculty. They are not Novell exams or Microsoft exams, but they will get you college credit.

Between the late fall of 1997 and May 2000, and excluding desktop applications, over 12,000

challenge examinations had been taken under the ITCAP program. Tellingly, though, and in the

words of a Pima administrator, “to the best of our knowledge, no student has continued to degree

[Associate’s] completion.”

66. A different version of this type of arrangement is the integration of multiple certifications

into a bachelor’s degree program. Regents College of Albany, NY, a non-profit specializing in

distance education degree programs and with a current enrollment of about 17,000, has teamed

with Microsoft, CompTIA, and Prometric to offer a BS in Computer Information Science with
27

credit-by-certification-exams (vendor and vendor-neutral) at the core. The program is open only

to those who either hold an associate’s degree or have previously earned 60 college credits. This

is a very promising mechanism both to facilitate transfer and to encourage long-term noncompleters (who have accounted for eight percent of recent cohorts of traditional-age college

entrants) to finish their degrees.

67. A third version involves colleges and community colleges purchasing complete packages

of on-line curricula from commercial developers, and placing the stamp of their own certifications

on completion of the package. The University of Colorado at Denver, for example, chose to take

clusters of network-oriented courses developed and delivered by WestNet, and offer its students

a “Certificate in Networking.” This is a convenient type of relationship for many institutions of

higher education faced with enrollment pressures that build at certain joints of the organization: it

allows the leveraging of instructional power, accommodation of greater numbers, and flexibility in

place and time of course delivery.

68. Lastly, some four-year institutions, both in the United States and other countries, have

become formal training-partners of the major vendors, offering course work through continuing

education and special divisions. Both Louisiana State University and the University of Akron,

for example, are Novell partners, as is the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. And a

special unit of the prestigious computer science department at Moscow State University,

REDlab, offers both Cisco and Sun certification course work. One finds these cases only on the

web sites of the vendors. Whether these instructional activities will move from organizational

peripheries to the mainstream of curricular offerings is an open question, one worth tracking.

69. The complex cross-currents of certification preparation course work in the traditional

postsecondary universe are revealed in Microsoft’s Authorized Academic Training Provider

(AATP) program. Microsoft distinguishes between its Certified Technical Education Centers,

commercial firms such as Global Knowledge or Azlan, and accredited educational institutions,

both high schools (see section #73 below) and postsecondary providers. To become an AATP,

an accredited school or college must agree to deliver Microsoft-approved courseware with

instructors who have passed Microsoft Certified Professional examinations on the topics of

instruction, and with hardware and facilities that meet Microsoft’s requirements (and that are

subject to inspection). In these dimensions of the relationship, the vendor, in effect, is acting as a

second accrediting agency.

But there are two other aspects of the dynamic that transcend traditional accrediting standards:

first, that the AATP “submit reports on course attendance,” and second, that the college or trade

school or high school agrees to cap at 12 per week the number of hours of instruction for any

certification preparation course. The reports on course attendance may provide the kind of data

on preparation for certification that has been so elusive to date. The 12-hour cap is more than a

gesture of respect for the rest of the institution’s curriculum: it keeps the IT certification program

at the margins. The cap also fits neatly into the learning rhythms of continuing education

students. Under these conditions, who has signed on?
28

70. Table 7, derived from a state-by-state listing on Microsoft’s Web site, indicates the

number AATP agreements in effect in different sectors of U.S. education as of August 2000. The

comments are mandatory.

Table 7.—Distribution of Microsoft Authorized Academic Training Providers (AATPs),

by Level and Control of Institution, Including Branch Campuses, August 2000

Category Number Comment

4-Year Public and Not for Profit 142 Approximately one-third are

continuing education units

4-Year For-Profit 42 Two-thirds are campuses of

the University of Phoenix

2-Year Public and Not for Profit 298 Includes multiple campuses

of large community college

districts such as Houston and

Allegheny (Pittsburgh)

2-Year For-Profit 103 Includes multiple campuses

of Heald, Herzing, and others

Indeterminable Postsecondary Status 39 Not listed in Barbett and Lin

(1998) nor otherwise located.

High Schools 129 More than half are technical/

vocational high schools.

There is no doubt that the postsecondary universe of AATPs is dominated by sub-baccalaureate

institutions, at least in the United States (in contrast, albeit in a smaller universe, eight of the ten

AATPs in Argentina are universities). And while there are some distinguished institutions in the

4-year collection, most of these are present only through continuing or extended education units.

This combination suggests that most of the pre-certification courseware will remain at the

periphery of higher education. The potential for growth in secondary education, however, is

another story.

Building a Pipeline

71. Pre-collegiate and threshold certifications are a growing phenomenon. Consider, for

example, the NetPrep program: sponsored by 3Com, with a curriculum developed by WestNet

Learning, and blessed with certifications from the National Association of Communication

Systems Engineers (NACSE). NetPrep offers four packages of courses, at different levels, to
29

both high schools and colleges, with accompanying examinations for junior-type certifications.

The threshold high school courses on networking fundamentals and LANS will get you a NACSE

Student Technical Certificate of Achievement. Add courses in Wide-Area-Networks (WANS)

and Networking Architecture, pass the exams, and you are dubbed a Student Network

Technician. The college-level packages are the same as those offered to NACSE membercandidates for two levels of Network Specialist certification, Associate and Senior. But in all

these cases, school and college, students must join the organization. This approach builds a

pipeline to the guild.

72. The Cisco Networking Academy, claiming nearly 3200 sites in 59 countries, is a foursemester program in which students can apply credits toward the Cisco Certified Network

Associate credential. Contrary to a popular belief, the academies are not confined to schools. Of

329 Academy locations in California, for example, seven are at 4-year colleges, 56 are at

community colleges, and eight are at secular institutions. It is difficult to determine total

enrollment and retention in the Cisco Academy programs, but some of the sites profiled on

Cisco’s website provide very indirect evidence: 50 students at Madison Area Technical College

in Wisconsin, 50 at Oakland (Calif.) Technical High School. Even though this program is vendorspecific, there is no question that students acquire generic industry knowledge of such key

elements of networks as protocols, configurations, filters, and segmentation.

73. We noted that the Microsoft AATP program included 129 high schools as of August

2000 (see table 7). Some of these high school programs were not born yesterday. Wyoming

started in 1995, and by 1998 had 250 students in eleven regular regional high schools enrolled in

the likes of generic Networking Essentials, Visual Basic programming, and vendor-specific

Windows NT Server software courses. A tech-prep articulation program has been worked out

with two of the state’s community colleges, and a dual-enrollment agreement can net the student

up to 21 college credits (including accounting and business mathematics in addition to the IT

certification preparation courses). Math through pre-calculus is required. There are no junior

certifications here. Instead, the student is given momentum on the path to certification. What is

more notable about the AATP high school program, though, is the required teacher training and

certification. When secondary school teachers must pass IT subject examinations and are

challenged to be certified as IT trainers, guild knowledge becomes resident at a very local level.

74. The Wings-21 program in Nebraska illustrates a different type of sponsorship and

approach. It was developed by a nonprofit consortium of business, government agencies, and

schools to introduce students to IT careers starting with a required Pathway-21 Course in grade

nine. Following this experience, 14 participating high schools teach Cisco technology, and area

businesses provide internships, for example, working with teachers on U.S.West projects in

application programming and database development. There is no specific pre-certification here,

and the vendor role is secondary to opening up paths to programming, multimedia, and business

applications. The metaphor of the “pipeline” is derived from fluid mechanics, and envisions a

closed space and an inevitable direction. The IT world doesn’t always work in such inexorable

ways, so the options inherent in the “path” approach of Wings-21are attractive.
30

Summary: the New Global Guild

So what is it? What is it not? And having learned something about it, can we say what it means

for traditional higher education.

75. First and foremost, the IT certification universe is an international guild that lies beyond

the ken or control of governments. The medieval guild engaged in a form of licensure that was

designed to facilitate and control the flow of labor and the level of knowledge/skills necessary to

practice a particular trade at the same time that it sought to protect its members from unwanted

intrusions and rivals (Le Goff, 1980; White, 1952). In some contrast, IT Industry certification is

a form of guild behavior that seeks to expand the labor pool as well as its flow. Its closest labor

market analogue in the licensure of allied health field specialties–licensure that is largely

borderless and competency-based.

Of course, certification is not a license. The practice of “Webmaster,” for example, does not

affect human health or safety, so the certificate for such employment is neither regulated nor

monitored by public authorities (as is the practice of nursing).

76. Second, because the guild lies beyond governmental oversight, we have little idea of who is

involved in certification and where. There are no unduplicated head-counts, there are no central

registries, there are no ledgers of providers or instructors. Even in the ITCAP program run by a

subsidiary corporation of the Pima Community College District in Arizona, 47 percent of

students enrolled in the fall semester, 1999 did not report race/ethnicity and 10 percent did not

report gender (age was another story: 75 percent were 30 or older). The closest we come to an

accounting is in the third-party testing centers, and because those parties are in competition,

whatever information they possess they consider confidential. In fact, the third-party testing

centers collect very little data: in the words of a VUE representative: “only...what is necessary to

register a candidate for an exam—name and contact information.”

77. Third, at the center of this transnational postsecondary system of teaching, learning, and

credentialing is not the local institution but the global student. We can call the system

“postsecondary” because the level of reading, reasoning, and communication skills necessary to

comprehend and apply its content assumes secondary level education in most countries. It is the

student who, on entering that system, negotiates different sources and ways of learning without

being bound to an institution in a given place in a given country. The e-mail addresses of inquirers

and respondents in the examination preparation chat-rooms of brainbuzz.com speak eloquently

to a worldwide community studying together. Indeed, what distinguishes this system most from

the academic world is that it operates the same way, with the same signals to students, and with

the same meanings—though in different languages—in Montreal, Manaus, Munich, Mogadishu,

Manila, Moscow, and Milwaukee (see Appendix B).
31

78. Fourth, the IT guild has brought competency-based education and performance

assessment to a status they have never enjoyed within traditional higher education. The guild has

implemented, in effect, many of the reforms espoused within the academy in the 1970s and

1980s. In all countries now, this new system cares most about your learning, your demonstrable

competence, and your potential in the IT workforce. It sets accessible criterion-referenced

standards of performance and is confident enough to turn the judgment of performance over to

competent third parties. Where you come from, what you look like, where you went to school,

how many credits and what degrees you earned, your SAT or ACT scores —these matters are

not even on the radar screen of the IT certification guild.

79. Fifth, the system is not higher education. It is not in the business of helping adolescents

become adults, of providing multidimensional education, or of teaching the literacy and numeracy

skills necessary to manipulate its own knowledge universe. It is a two-dimensional system, and,

for that reason, is not higher education and does not pretend to be. To the extent that formal

coursework is part of its offerings, the IT guild’s instructors are teachers, not university faculty.

They are a different kind of workforce.

Industry certifications, whether in information technology or other fields, replace neither

experience nor degrees. Nor do they pretend to represent an assessment of the full range and

depth of knowledge, skills, or potential contribution to organizational productivity. Instead, we

might say, the certification serves to augment experience and traditional credentials. For their

part, employers do not require certification, rather reward it. Microsoft’s and Novell’s salary

surveys consistently evidence a post-certification premium of 4-14 percent in the combination of

base pay plus bonuses.

80. Students know this. From their demand-side behavior, the search for certifications other

than academic degrees is seen as yielding mobility in “work life.” Unlike the period dominated by

the guilds, let alone most of the 20th century, labor market experience is no longer linear or

unidimensional. People assemble valises of special knowledge and skills, apply them in different

work-organization contexts, and modify them by (1) personal predilection, (2) personal

perception of potential “work life” paths, and (3) labor market change. With each of these

modifications or enhancements, we have come to realize, work life mobility demands the

transparent and portable evidence of a certification. We may not be tracking the phenomena well,

but the data cited earlier in this monograph suggest that considerable numbers of students are

finding these certifications and the “secular” entities that provide the preparation.

Information Needs for National Planning Everywhere

This parallel universe has sufficient resources and momentum to go its own way. To the extent to

which there are occasional interactions between its secular providers and the traditional

postsecondary and tertiary sectors in various countries, we will catch glimpses of its scope and

dynamics, and may be stimulated to adapt some of its performance assessment processes. But

there is no question that the public interest in a 100 nations would be well served if we possessed
32

at least the same information about certification candidates and their backgrounds, enrollments,

and awards, and the same information about providers (the “training partners”) as we do for the

universe we know. As much as they are appreciated, we can not rely on surveys of certificate

recipients producing 20 percent response rates (from small samples to begin with) from one

major vendor (Microsoft) to tell us what is transpiring and for whom. Nor can we rely on the

country-distribution of one highly-elite population, the roughly 5,000 Certified Cisco

Internetworking Experts (CCIEs) as of July 2000 (see Appendix B) to tell us where it is

happening. All nations must plan and budget for the provision of postsecondary schooling. If a

significant number of individuals follow paths that use the parallel universe, their actions affect

planning and budgeting, and because the universe is transnational its information is analogous to

that necessary for international trade. No one government can require or collect this information.

The effort might be coordinated through an international organization, and with the voluntary

cooperation of the IT guild, which might establish a central registry of certified individuals, with

enough information on educational and demographic backgrounds to help policy-makers map the

full dynamics of global postsecondary education.

This information would have a considerable impact on our assumptions concerning the capacity

of the system of postcompulsory schooling, and the way we plan for future enrollments. By

national policy, and beyond the increases that would occur naturally by demographic dynamics,

the United States has invited about two million new students into the higher education sector.

These people—and others—will go to school in very different ways than was true as recently as

1990. Yet we have not factored in multi-institutional attendance and the secular providers into

our calculations at all. We talk glibly about “tsunamis” for which we are unprepared, rush to

open branch campuses, put existing campuses on 24/7 schedules, and flagellate ourselves when

students enroll for only a few courses and then disappear. We may turn around some day to find

that these students have “disappeared” into the world of the secular providers. But until the

parallel universe becomes part of national accounting systems and until we learn to follow the

student—and not the institution—we’ll never know.
33

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curriculum.jsp&BV_SessionID= . . . . . .

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March-August, 2000, pp. 146-151, 175.

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catinc.com/catglobal2.htm

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comptia.org/certification/networkplus/fees.asp Received: 7/10/00

49. certprep.com/TakeQuiz.asp Received: 1/30/00

wwe.certification.net/mns/mgt/mgtho.html Received: 2/3/00

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microsoft.com/mcp/articles.tesinn.htm Received: 1/26/00

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downloaded through microsoft.com/mcp/articles/adaptFAQ.htm

Received: 1/26/00

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comptia.org/certification Received: 6/26/00

tcpmag.com/column.asp?id=EXAM&cid=2 Received: 7/11/00

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51. cisco.com/warp/public/625/ccie/ Received: 2/14/00

tcpmag.com/column.asp?id=EXAM&cid=29 Received: 7/11/00

52. braindumps.com/it/Sun/temp1.htm Received: 7/11/00

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54. comptia.org/certification/edia/fees.asp Received: 2/3/00

microsoft.com/mcp/articles/IISFAQ.htm Received: 1/26/00

prometric.com/html/pressreleases/mar3(a)_99.htm Received: 1/3/00

55. 209.0.85.150/certification/networkplus/SMEs.htm Received: 2/3/00

microsoft.com/mcp/examinfo.retired.htm Received: 1/26/00

56. prometric.com/html.pressreleases/mar10_99.htm Received: 1/3/00
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57. nacse.com/pages/Corp_Intro.html Received: 2/3/00

webu.net Received: 2/3/00

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info@wubu.net (Art Dyck) e-mail Received: 2/12/00

58. dr.org/ADRP.html Received: 1/24/00

dr.org/educate.htm Received: 1/24/00

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59. iwanet.org/cgi-bin/cbw/display.cgi?cbw Received: 2/5/00

iwanet.org/profdevel/ Received: 2/5/00

60. java.sun.com/cert_initiative/index.html Received: 1/25/00

java.sun.com/cert_initiative/tracks.html Received: 1/25/00

suned.sun.com/certification/faqprogrammer.html Received: 1/25/00

61. Novell Education CNE Progress Chart, Updated 2/2/2000 Download: 2/13/00

2test.com/register/scripts/client.asp Received: 1/26/00

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comptia.org/certification/certification.htm Received: 7/10/00

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cisco.com/warp/public/10/wwtraining/listALLTP.html Received: 7/31/00

69. microsoft.com/aatp/guide.htm Received: 8/6/00
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microsoft.com/aatp/require.htm Received: 8/6/00

70. microsoft.com/aatp/community..../default.asp?cboLocale= Received: 8/6/00

microsoft.com/argentina/adacemico/aatp.htm Received: 8/6/00

71. nacse.com/pages/netprep_faq.html Received: 2/3/00

nacse.com/pages.netprep_asia_faq.html Received: 2/3/00

72. cisco.com/warp/public/779/edu/academy/overview.html Received: 2/19/00

cisco.netacad.net/cnacs/pub-doc/academy_selection.shtml Received: 2/19/00

cisco.com/warp/public/779/edu/academy/profiles Received: 2/19/00

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I through IV, downloaded through cisco.com/warp/public/779/edu/academy/curriculum.html

73. microsoft.com/aatp/wyoming.htm Received: 8/6/00

microsoft.com/aatp/WYpref.htm Received: 8/6/00

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mcpmag.com/members/98Feb_old/fea1body.asp Received: 3/26/00
40

Appendix A:

Three Interacting Platforms

For readers who would like a very concise outline, let us aggregate the observations made above,

and put them in an order that reflects the emergence of the IT industry certification guild. There

is nothing linear about the process. There are three distinct platforms in this development that are

constantly interacting.

Platform I: Establishing the Certification of Competence

• Vendors (international corporations such as Microsoft, Novell, SAP, Sun, Oracle, Cisco

and others) establish standards for performance with their product-systems. They

ultimately determine whether an individual meets those standards.

• Acting individually, each vendor constructs a set of examinations that signals a

comprehensive competence. A certificate is to be awarded to individuals who pass the

required examinations. Some certificates require performance assessments and industry

experience in addition to the tests. The certificate is given a discrete vendor-based name,

e.g. Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

• Within fields covered by a certificate, vendors establish sub-specialty certificates, and

some create hierarchies of certifications analogous to hierarchies of academic degrees.

• Vendors recognize that their product-systems share a great deal, and, in practical

circumstances, interact. Networks are a good example of a territory in which this

commonality and interaction can be observed. Some standards for performance, then,

become generic. Some vendors accept the examinations or certifications of other vendors as

part of their own certification processes.

• Industry Associations, often consisting of sub-field specialists, develop analogous

standards, examinations, and procedures of certification. These are not vendor specific.

Where there are a number of industry associations in the same sub-field, certifications may

overlap. The various Webmaster certifications are a good example.

• The vendors and the industry associations are the only recognized certifying authorities,

and they insure a constant feedback loop from the instructional and testing platforms.

• For the industry associations, vendors, and other employers of IT professionals, the

values of the certification lie in (a) guaranteed currency of knowledge, (b) intellectual and

skills leadership of certified employees, (c) less down-time and greater efficiency,

particularly in a rapidly-changing technological environment, and (d) where applicable,

staff interactions with other parts of the industry through the guild, hence, greater

organizational knowledge.

Platform II: Providing Opportunity-to-Learn

• The vendors recognize that anyone–in any nation–should have the opportunity to acquire

the competence and knowledge required to pass their examinations and qualify for
41

certification. They thus develop curricula and the materials/technology for delivery of those

curricula–and in many languages. To be sure, providing these opportunities to learn also

creates a skilled labor pool.

• Some vendors function as schools themselves. They offer traditional classroom instruction

at many locations around the world. They certify instructors, rent facilities, and charge

tuition for the course work. They also provide courseware in CD-ROM format and on-line

from strategically located servers. Tuition is charged for those modes of learning/instruction

as well.

• Most vendors, however, link with commercial and training companies. These “training

partners” must first be reviewed and authorized by the vendor as knowledgeable in the

curriculum, skilled in instructional delivery, and possessing appropriate capacity to

accommodate various types and volumes of enrollments in their service area. Training

partners can also include traditional higher education institutions and other non-profit

entities, though these are more loosely-coupled to the vendor. Despite review and

authorization, the quality of training may vary widely.

• Industry associations follow suit, linking with “training partners” to provide the

opportunity-to-learn.

• Some training partners offer their own certifications in the same fields as those offered by

the vendors, but in a more generic, vendor-neutral form. These generic forms, like those of

the industry associations, resemble college majors. Network Administration is a good

example.

• On-line education providers that are not official “training partners” sell support tutorials

and self-study materials on specific topics in the certification sequences, and others

provide settings for learning exchanges between those studying for examinations and those

who have already passed through the gates of certification. The industry recognizes that, in

a world of lifetime learners, preparation for certification does not necessarily require formal

course work.

Platform 3: Testing and the Award of Certifications

• Both vendors and industry associations develop their own examinations for each portion of

knowledge/competence required for a specific certification. Public statements of expected

competencies, along with practice examinations, are available on-line.

• The examinations take many forms, and some are available in languages other than English.

Some are computer-adaptive, some are based on case studies, some involve simulations,

and some are Item Response Theory (IRT)-based multiple choice. Every vendor or

industry association that develops these tests retains a staff of testing experts.

• Examinations are under constant review for content. They are frequently “retired” and

replaced so that they reflect contemporary knowledge demands.

• The vendor or industry association determines the passing (cut) score on the examinations.

• A minor industry has grown up around IT certification examinations: test-preparation

manuals, special test-prep classes and CD-ROM based practice tests. These are signs of
42

maturing credentials, but also expected in an industry that encourages existing employees to

seek certification.

• The examinations are administered either by vendors themselves or by independent testing

companies. There are at least three major global testing firms on which the information

technology and telecommunications industries principally rely to conduct examinations.

Collectively, these firms operate 5,000 testing centers in 140 countries.

• “Candidates” for certification submit examination scores and other requested material to the

vendor or industry association, which then awards the certification.

• Most certifications must be either renewed or maintained by continuing education,

seminars, and/or examination.
43

Appendix B:

Two Indicators of Global Reach in a Cisco Certification and in the Languages of

Course Offerings by Cisco Training Partners

Worldwide Distribution of Certified Languages of Course Offerings by

Cisco Internetworking Experts (CCIEs) Cisco Training Partners,

as of July 31, 2000 July 1, 2000 through Dec. 31, 2000

North America 2488 Language Courses Offerings

U.S. 2299

Canada 145 Croatian 1 2

Mexico 44 Czech 3 5

Danish 7 41

South America 67 Dutch 6 136

Finnish 2 5

Europe 1571 French 13 238

German 23 702

Belgium 154 Greek 3 10

France 126 Indonesian 5 6

Germany 282 Italian 10 99

Netherlands 76 Japanese 3 12

Russia 48 Mandarin 7 12

Spain 44 Norwegian 2 4

Sweden 65 Polish 5 23

U.K. 389 Portuguese 15 67

Russian 5 17

Africa 83 Spanish 10 78

Swedish 2 8

Middle East 20 Turkish 3 8

Pacific Rim 765

Australia 184

China 108

Japan 224

Singapore 55

Other: 2

TOTAL: 4,996

Sources: cisco.com/warp/public/625/ccie Received: 8/16/00

 cisco.com/warp/public/10/wwtraining Received: 8/18/00