Certifiable?

The Agile Project Leadership Network is working on a certificate program in Agile Leadership.

This has been discussed a bit on the Agile Leadership Yahoo group. I just emailed a reply and thought I would share it here ..

Ron "The Don" Jeffries Wrote:
>But rightly so. My lack of comments on the topic should be read as
>coming from a similar frame of mind, oddly conflated with "if you
>can't say something nice, don't say anything at all".
>

What I don't get is what pushes _everybody_ toward certification.

It's ... odd. It's like ...

1) Form a club (Association, Company, Institute, Take Your Pick)
2) Create a Code of Ethics
3) Run a Conference
4) Create a certification program
5) ?
6) Profit!

It doesn't matter if you are scrum or agile or a software tester, everyone seems to push in this direction. Aside from step 6, which, I must admit, sounds nice, I don't get it.

I went to seminar on perl certification at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in 2003. The moderator was Tim Mahr; you can read his opinion here: http://minimalperl.com/consultix/publications/perlcert_article.html

His main talking point seemed to be that certification allowed the employer to reduce the risk of a bad hire -- if you hire a certified java guy, you know you are going to get a certain level of competence.

This seems, to me, to be like outsourcing the function of discernment.

If your managers of software development don't have discernment, well ... you've got a problem. Maybe instead of a crutch, you should be working on that?

Now, a certificate in Agile Leadership, used for the same purposes ... on it's face, that concerns me, but I just don't have enough information to tell at this point.

The ALPN feedback cycle is now apparently private; does anyone have any contact information, so I can find out more without mucking the waters?

--heusser