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?

Do we need more Certified Professional Instructors?

While I was at NI Week I took the training to become a Certified Professional Instructor (CPI). I just found out that I passed. My hope is to teach NI classes here at the University of Michigan and at the local NI training center. In a recent exchange at the LAVA forums I made the claim that we need more CPIs, and that claim was met with some skepticism. Do we need more CPIs? Why do we need them at all?

In my previous post I pointed out that NI is not in the business of teaching. They do have a training center and they do make a profit from teaching, but providing teachers for every class held in every country is obviously outside their core business model. More importantly, the teachers provided by NI have been non-certified, though that might be changing since they are now allowed to pursue certification. But the question remains: will NI teachers be held to the same standards as CPIs?

CPIs must have at least a CLD to teach NI classes. Will NI require the same from their own employees? I speculated previously that we will see many CLAD certifications from NI employees but that the number of CLDs and CLAs will be much lower. Will NI have enough CLD employees willing to pursue CPI certification, especially since trainers usually move on to other areas of the company after their first two years? It remains to be seen. My guess is that there will not be a large enough pool of NI CPIs to handle the teaching load. NI will have to either generate enough home-grown CPIs every two years to teach all the classes offered throughout the world, or they will have to continue their current double-standard policy of certified outsider/non-certified insider instructors. And even if NI could somehow provide a steady stream of new in-house CPIs, those CPIs would have at most two years of experience.

This is why we need more active, practicing CPIs. Teaching classes is one way that we, the LabVIEW community, can help promote and expand the use of LabVIEW. With more practicing CPIs the pool of qualified, experienced teachers will grow, students will be better served, and NI engineers will be able to focus their efforts on producing quality hardware and software. It's a win-win situation.

NI begins to eat its own certification dog food

When a company "eats its own dog food", it means that they use the products that they produce (for more on the phrase, see here). I'm going to extend that definition a bit to cover companies that follow the policies that they enforce on others. NI has recently begun to eat its own dog food on the certification issue.

I heard it mentioned by a number of NI employees at NI Week '08 that they were now eligible, even encouraged, to pursue certification in NI products. This is a reversal of NI's previous policy. Previously, NI employees were barred from pursuing certification. Lifting this ban is a welcome change, but I am still puzzled about why the ban was instituted in the first place.

During the Q&A that followed my talk at NI Week an audience member presented a list of things they disliked about certification. I responded with some suggestions for improving the certification process, one of which was that NI "eat its own dog food". An NI employee in the audience replied that they were now eligible to take the certification tests. When I asked him why they weren't allowed to take them before, his answer was that NI was concerned that the value of certification would be "cheapened" by having a so many NI people on the list. He suggested that certification would be more valuable if the numbers were kept artificially low by keeping NI employees off the list.

That answer didn't satisfy me then, and it doesn't satisfy me now. There are a number of problems with it:

• The value of a certification is only indirectly impacted by the number of people who hold it. The direct value of a certification in any field is determined by the value of the skills it represents, and on the organization that issues the certification. College diplomas are a good example. The worth of a diploma depends on your field of study and where you studied it. The economic value of the certification will be directly affected by the number of people who hold it, but that should not be NI's concern. NI should be concerned with making certification represent a meaningful skill set.
• NI employees teach many of the classes recommended as preparation for certification. They also grade the CLD and CLA exams. This means that all CLD and CLA certifications are granted by people who are not certified themselves. Can you imagine a medical certification board populated by non-certified medical practitioners? A bar association populated by non-certified lawyers?

That answer also displays some arrogance, or at least "out-of-touchness" on NI's part. My guess is that even though NI employees are now eligible to take the exams, we won't see a flood of NI certifications in the near future. The reason for this is simple: NI is not in the business of application engineering and system integration. NI's application engineers are typically new hires, mostly recent college graduates. NI puts them in application engineering for two years as a way of teaching them about NI products. They do phone support, teach classes, etc. It is a sink-or-swim, trial-by-fire approach that is probably very effective at bringing people up-to-speed quickly. The problem, though, is that after the two years are up they are expected to find a more permanent position elsewhere in the company. That means that the bulk of NI's most experienced application engineers have at most two years of LabVIEW programming experience, and that during those two years they have probably worked on only small-scale programming projects.

I would expect that with this kind of background we will see a large number of NI employees get the CLAD certification. Indeed, if an experienced NI application engineer can't pass the CLAD exam then they are probably in the wrong line of work and should seek a position elsewhere in NI as soon as possible. But is it reasonable to expect that the typical NI application engineer would easily pass the CLD or the CLA exam? I'm sure that many will pass these exams but to expect a flood of certifications at those levels is unrealistic.

So, am I off base or on target? If there are any NI employees out there who can shed more light on this policy and its recent change I would love hearing from you.

Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community?

I gave a talk at NI Week '08 titled "From Spaghetti Code to State Machines: One Man's Journey through the Certification Process" about the positive effect certification has had on my LabVIEW programming ability and style. The talk was on Tuesday and it generated some interesting and sometimes heated conversations the rest of the week. People would come up to me, tell me they liked my talk, and would proceed to give me their opinions on the topic. It was great, I didn't have to solicit people's opinions, they just came up to me and started talking. The responses tended to follow a bipolar distribution. People said either "That was my story you told!" or "Certification sucks, it's just a way for NI to milk their user base for more money!".

I hope to discuss these responses more fully in future posts, but for now I've put a poll on the sidebar of this blog asking a very simple question. Is certification a good thing for the LabVIEW community? This is not a referendum on NI's current implementation of the certification process. I'll save that for future polls. This is simply a thumbs up, thumbs down vote on certification in general. Do we need it? Is it beneficial?

This is an important question to us as a community. Certification is a major part of how the LabVIEW community relates to National Instruments. If certification is a bad idea, we should tell NI to scrap it. If it is a good idea, we should be part of the process of helping NI improve it. Which is it going to be?