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.