Sunday, February 25, 2007

Guerrilla Certification?

During some recent discussions with a large TelCo client, the issue of certification for the various Guerrilla training classes came up. If I understood correctly, the idea would be to augment each class with some kind of ranking (e.g., Levels I, II, III) to denote the proficiency level achieved by a student taking a particular class. This would be useful to managers who would like to better categorize the level of competency of each employee they send to Guerrilla training. The Guerrilla classes are not currently organized along those lines, but they could be.

There are some possible complicating factors that could creep in. Questions that immediately spring to mind are:

  • Would the Guerrilla levels just be an internal ranking provided by Performance Dynamics?

  • Is there any need to have such levels certified by an outside institution e.g., a university?

  • Is there a need to have such levels associated with continuing education (CEU) credits?


I would be interested to hear from both managers and Guerrilla alumni on this idea.

2 comments:

steve jenkin said...

You've got a tension in your teaching aims between "useful" and "qualification". If there's an assessment at the end, people will focus on learning for that... Assessments also take away time from teaching. And do you offer a simple Pass/Fail or something more?

I'm expecting you seldom get "tourists" in your courses using it as a holiday from work.

The CISCO "CCIE" is probably the world's hardest and most useful vendor-based I.T. certification. So much so that they provide a website to confirm/deny that a person has CCIE status.

And they aren't static - every few years, you have to requalify... Or lose the qualification.

There's more - in the two days of testing, there is theory testing and lots of practical testing.

Question: What's the simplest thing that you could do to give candidates a certificate for their wall??

An answer: Certificate of Attendance :-)

If you can offer "world's only certification in performance analysis", it's an angle.

If your certification is audited/authorised by a professional body or group (CMG?), it may have more 'cachet'. But you'd expect higm compliance costs, which will drill down into fees.

You coiuld run testing as a completely different business - perhaps via the CMG. You've got enough case study material to frame difficult and useful tests.

An interesting idea, as always.

Neil Gunther said...

Two worthy attributes that I see right now are:
1. Internal ranking.
For example:
o GCaP is level 1
o GDat is level 2
o PDQ class could be level 3

2. A certificate for attendees.

It's not like I'm offering 100 classes.