External Certification Advisory Board: A Proposal

There is an interesting current thread about certification in the LAVA forum here. In it a very good reason was supplied about why NI did not until recently allow its employees to pursue certification: lack of resources. Grading the CLD and CLA exams is time consuming, and in order to promote certification among the LabVIEW community NI decided to allocate all of their exam-grading resources to the community. By excluding NI employees from certification, all of the NI exam graders would be dedicated full-time to servicing the global LabVIEW community.

We, as a community, want NI to succeed. We want LabVIEW usage to grow. Those of us who believe that certification is a good thing want the pool of certified practitioners to increase. But since grading exams is time-consuming and demands resources, will this become a bottleneck that hinders the proliferation of certification in the future?

Here is a proposal of how the LabVIEW community can help: NI could create an external certification advisory board. The board would be made up of CLDs, CPIs and CLAs drawn from alliance partner companies, academia, etc. Membership would be by invitation from NI. Members of the board would help grade certification exams at their certification level or lower. Instead of having all exams graded by NI employees, have each exam graded by one board member and one NI employee. This would reduce the grading load on NI employees while at the same time providing NI with a measure of quality control on the grades issued by board members. Board members could help craft new exam questions. They could provide feedback to NI from the user community about certification issues. They would also be available to "grade the graders", facilitating the certification of NI's in-house staff that currently grade exams.

An external board like this would provide many benefits to both NI and the LabVIEW community. Serving on the board would definitely require time and effort, though, and that raises the question of compensation. The grading load on individual board members would be a function of the size of the board, so it could be adjusted to a reasonable level. But still, what incentive would there be for a working LabVIEW practioner to serve on the board?

Money always works. CPIs are paid a daily rate for teaching classes, perhaps a per test rate could be established for grading. Another suggestion would be to reward board membership by pausing, extending, or rewinding the recertification clock. For example, if a board member graded ten exams in a given year the period of their current certification might be extended by a year. Or perhaps the recertification exam (and perhaps the fee) would be waived for board members who graded a certain number of exams during their own recertification period.

But those are just details. Something could be worked out. So, what do you think? Would a board like that be a good idea? If you were invited to serve on such a board, would you accept the invitation?