Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

Some of my readers may know that I am the Chair for the Board of Directors of the Linux Professional Institute (LPI).  Like many things I do, this is a volunteer job, and I could not do it without help from many other volunteers.

Founded in 1999, LPI was created as a Canadian based non-profit to “certify users of computer software programs” and “facilitate the exchange of information between computer users”. Since that time LPI has delivered over 500,000 tests, and currently has over 200,000 certificate holders in over 180 countries.

The certifications so far are on four major levels, known as “LPI Linux Essentials (LE)”, “Linux Administrator (LPIC-1)”, “Linux Systems Engineer (LPIC-2)” and a variety of advanced topics at the LPIC-3 level such as “Security”, “Virtualization and High Availability” and “Mixed Environment”.

LPI separates the function of “certification” from “learning”, allowing potential job seekers to study the objectives for each test and to pick the method of learning that suits them best, whether it be self-study, reading articles on the Internet or from magazines and books, or taking a formal course from one of LPI's many partners.

LPI is a community-based model for developing its certifications. LPI first creates a “Job Task Analysis” to see what types of tasks and knowledge that someone needs to do a particular job. LPI reaches out to the community of people who are actually performing that job or managing those people. LPI then gathers these job tasks, analyzes them, and creates a list of these tasks. After the JTA is created, LPI then approaches this community of people and asks of them what types of questions would these people ask of a job candidate to determine that they could do those tasks correctly. Finally, give that list of questions, LPI approaches the community to find out what answers would be expected as “correct”.

After this procedure the test questions are put into beta tests, given to potential certification holders, and the tests and answers run through a process called psychometrics that uses statistics to help assure the quality of the testing procedure.

Recently LPI decided to create an LPI Certification Open Technology for DevOPs named “LPIC-OT DevOps Engineer Certification”. Unlike other LPI tests (which were GNU/Linux oriented), this certification is OS neutral, and therefore hopefully useful for GNU/Linux, *BSD, Apple and (perhaps even) Microsoft Windows DevOps Engineers. The certification will test the ability of the candidate to create a DevOps workflow and to optimize their daily administration and development tasks. One major concession to LPI's strategy, however, is to focus on “Open Source” and freely available DevOPs tools and procedures when available versus closed source tools.

Therefore LPI is asking DevOps engineers and managers to participate in defining the Job Task Analysis. If you are willing to help LPI (and in the traditional FOSS way, eventually helping yourself), please go to http://lpi.org/devops and participate in the Job Task Analysis.

Thank you, and Carpe Diem!

maddog