Managing Product Development

There’s an car dealership advertising a multiple-point certification for pre-owned vehicles. To me that translates into “checklist for used cars.”

That’s what a certification for people based on book knowledge is also–a checklist that a person knew the right answer. Nothing about the experience or if the experience that led to that knowledge was successful.

Cars with a lot of experience are used. You want to see a certification that they still work. Car experience is no predictor of future experience, except that something is more likely to break, because of the experience.

People with lots of experience are also “used,” but people who’ve learned from their experience are more useful(valuable) than people who haven’t. People who haven’t learned from their experience are like new cars or uncertified pre-owned cars–you can’t tell where they’ll break. At least with people who’ve learned from their experiences, you might have more insight into where their experience is not useful.

A certification for a car tells you where the experience has (or might have) eroded the car’s value. A certification for a person tells you nothing, except that the person studied for and passed a test. Don’t confuse people with cars. A certification for used car is much more valuable than a certification passed by a person.

I’m not a big fan of body-of-knowledge based certifications. Testing to someone to detect if they’ve learned the words in books is not adequate to determine actual skill on the job. (Note that there are skill-based certifications, generally from vendors, that appear to be quite useful at detecting if the person is capable of performing a particular kind of work.)

But this week, I’ve heard of two uses for certifications that may be worth the time people spend studying:

• Using a certification course of study to increase knowledge of functional skills, and then working with a manager, applying those skills to work. A talented test manager told me he uses this technique to help his testers (smart people who were not trained as testers) learn how to perform different kinds of testing and when to apply those techniques.
• Developing the necessary BOK (Bodies of Knowledge) for specific industries or products and helping people work through those BOKs to show competence as an outsource vendor. An outsource vendor asked my opinion on the variety of tester certifications and when I explained I thought knowledge-based certifications missed the application-of-knowledge part, I suggested he develop his BOKs and certify his testers himself, based on what they’ve done, not just what they’ve learned.

Both of these managers are considering the application of knowledge, not just the acquisition of knowledge — a useful technique for certification.