Certification schemes
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2004-12-02 07:35:28 - Graham EllisShould we offer certified training courses to agendas laid down by the likes of Sun, Adobe and Zend, or should we offer courses to our own agendas? There are arguments both ways, and we reconsider from time to time. I thought you might be interested in a (slightly long) item I wrote in response to a specific enquiry a few minutes ago (relating to PHP and the Zend certification)
We have given repeated consideration over a number of years to providing "official" training and taking part in "certification schemes" for some of the products on which we train, but haven't gone with any of them. Although it might help us to sell our courses in a few cases, we believe that we can do better offering our customers training to suit their need on the ground, rather than to pass an exam or to produce a "cookie-cutter" developer. A further issue is the conflict of interest created by us running a training course on which the attendee is provided with a certificate making him more easily able to move away from the employer who has paid for his training. There's more written on this topic elsewhere on our site and the text quoted on that page is actually relating to PHP certification from Zend ....
Of course, the fact that we write our own notes and set our own agenda means that we have to take especial care to ensure that we provide both what is right for the client, and what is going to be right to see him into the future too. We do this in a number of ways. Firstly, we do read extensively - the press, online, books, etc. Secondly, we undertake contract work ourselves and actually use the subjects that we teach. Thirdly, we listen to our trainees and their requirements; some of them get pretty advanced in specialist areas, others send more junior staff to us and already have senior (and very knowledgeable) PHP gurus on their staff. Fourthly, we review other training offerings on PHP to ensure that we're reasonably in line and not missing anything - although we don't simply duplicate their offerings of course! Examples that we've looked at within the last couple of months include several London courses - see my further comments. We've also looked at other offerings such as those from First Alternative, Oracle, Academy X and Media Training. Additionally although we're not offering the certification (with the cost and other implications), we have reviewed the agenda / program for it and have a copy of the study guide ISBN number 0-672-32709-0 which is for sale at bookstores, and is now available for reference during our course. I'm confident that our course provides good training which will meet the basic requirements of the exam which I understand can be sat independently at a Prometric centre if you so wish.
I have left what is, perhaps, the most important way we keep our course up to date until last. It's vital that I (as the tutor) understand not only the mechanisms of the language, but also the application and best practice, and the intent of the authors and developers. For that reason, I take "time out" to travel and listen to the originators and active people at the "sharp end". PHP was written by Rasmus Lerdorf, who now works for Yahoo in Toronto where it remains an active part of his interest and area of influence. He stopped off in southern Europe on his way to Japan in October, and I travelled there to attend some day-and-a-half of talks he gave - the only lectures he did on what was also a holiday stopover. What did I learn? Not the language, but the intended practice, a direction for the future so that I don't lead trainees up blind alleys, and answers to some nagging "why" questions that no-one else seemed to know the answers to. And I now pass on that knowledge during our courses ....
You've already seen how we run an "Open" web site - full details of our staff, our prices are published on line. We're proud of what we can offer. However, we also respect the privacy of our clients and don't publish a customer list. Occasionally, a customer will himself publish the fact that he's Well House Consultants trained and recommend us ... Oxford University, for example.
A longish answer here - I hope it helps fill you in, and helps you decide whether our PHP training course is the one you should choose.
Postscript. . We currently offer three different PHP / related courses:
Technology for PHP
PHP Programming
Object Oriented Programming in PHP
Of these three, the PHP programming is the relevant course for most trainees. We have servers running both PHP 4 and PHP 5 available on the course; at the present time, most live servers are running PHP4, and the course is suitable for both, encouraging you to write code for your current system but ensuring that it will also run on PHP5 (there is one specific compatibility issue in core PHP4 v 5, and a number of additions you'll want to be aware of).