The value of certification

I should be the world's biggest advocate of certifications. I hold more than a half-dozen of them, and I've written articles and books on how to get certified and how certifications can help your career. However, having certifications brings mixed results, particularly when they are not coupled with experience. Whether a certification will mean something to your situation is based on a few simple factors.

Quality of the certification
Certifications mean only that a standard was met. When you pass the certification exam, the certification agency (Microsoft, Cisco, etc.) verifies that you meet the requirements for the certification. When boiled down to its most basic level, certifications are ways for you to confirm that you meet certain minimum standards.

Of course, meeting the standards for a certification is appropriate when the standards are established correctly. By correctly, I mean that they are relevant to the tasks being done by the certified individual and that they are set at the appropriate level for the job type performed.

Two ways standards are set
Standards are set in two primary ways to ensure that they are appropriate. First, they are established by performing a job task analysis. Using this approach, certification providers study the activities of a typical candidate for certification and identify the skills that the candidate should possess. Those skills are then converted into an exam that measures a candidate's ability to demonstrate those skills.

The second component in ensuring that the standards are set correctly is determining which skills are appropriate for the kind of certification that is being designed. For example, knowing how to set up RAID controllers in a PC may not be appropriate for a network configuration exam. However, for a server-based certification such as CompTIA's Server+, it would be appropriate to ask about the setup and configuration of a RAID controller. A PC hardware technician exam that asks about RAID controllers would probably not be well received by the industry because it is not at an appropriate level.

Once the standards are set appropriately, the translation process must be performed to convert the list of skills into a set of questions that can test those skills. This is the one area in which most certifications fail. They have adequately captured the skills that must be present for someone to be successful in a position, but they are unable to translate them into a meaningful set of questions for the exam.

Exam design
One of the challenges in exam design is the typical multiple-choice exam format. It's easy to score with a computer, but the format makes it difficult to test higher levels of understanding of the material.

An educator named Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues developed a taxonomy of educational objectives that enabled teachers to assess the level of understanding of the material being presented by determining what a student could do with the information.

At its most basic level is knowledge that defines the ability to recognise and recall the information. This level is the one most often tested by exams since it is the easiest to test. The higher levels are comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. They define higher levels of understanding, which at the highest level allows a student to evaluate the information with respect to other information. In other words, the student can evaluate how the information fits in with other information the student already possesses.