The job postings for information technology professionals can run anywhere from 100 to more than 500 words, but in most cases the qualifications could probably be boiled down to three things. You want a team player, you want someone trustworthy and you want someone who knows what they're doing.
As with most jobs, companies tend to hire such people based on their education, experience and references. If it was a more mature industry, like engineering, employers would probably require something else: To see the letters PEng after the candidate's surname, to prove that they belong to a body of professional engineers who will attest to that person's competency and adherence to standards. Certification by a professional group can provide the kind of reassurance you would think more companies would want to have about their IT staff, but Canada's technology industry has so far greeted the idea with an apathy that can only prove dangerous as our dependency on computers grows.
A lot of software vendors offer what they call "certification," but it only means that someone has passed a test (and paid a lot of money in the process) to prove they know how to handle that vendor's particular set of products. For the core functions of IT management, there can be no test. Technology changes too fast and too much, and the scope of the job requires not just technical expertise but project management skills and unshakeable ethics. It is not easy to certify that someone has what IT takes.
This is the struggle facing the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), a national IT organization that offers its own certification. It's called Information Systems Professional, or ISP, an unfortunate choice of abbreviation given that we use the same one to talk about Internet service providers. Recognition is just one issue, though. A bigger problem is that only about 1,500 of CIPS's 5,700 members have bothered to become an ISP.
For years, CIPS has been waging an annual campaign to get those numbers up.
"From an employer perspective, the drivers [for hiring certified people] deal with risk management, in trying to mitigate the risks around regulatory compliance," CIPS president John Boufford says. "For the employee, it's the idea that you want to be able to do the right thing when you're in unknown waters. . . . IT is like a spider web. You touch something in one corner, and the whole thing might start to shake."
CIPS has traditionally certified ISPs by asking them to complete an application form that evaluates their experience with technology. Mr. Boufford says the group has started to realize, however, that not everyone in IT started in computer science. That's why CIPS is planning to expand the qualifications for its certification program this year to academics, and to those who may be in charge of information systems but who don't hold a traditional IT degree.
"They're still going to have to have IT experience and demonstrate mastery of the body of knowledge. This isn't a person that works at the periphery of IT," he says. "It may be those who start off as a business analyst, and from there move to more core IT activities. There may be others who were involved in strategic planning at the policy level who align themselves with IT after they get a couple of opportunities in that area."
I've met these kinds of people. Instead of starting in IT and working hard to develop business savvy, they started out with an MBA or a background in admin and use technology the way it's supposed to be used as an enabler for business processes.
