Re: What Use is OCP? Plenty!

There are three big issues I have with "Oracle Certified Professional"

1. Oracle - This word carries a spurious aura of "better than you could get elsewhere". The fact that there is a training group that happens to share the name of the product they have on their curriculum doesn't PROVE that there courses or trainers are any better than the rest. Look at the quality of the books churned out under the Oracle Press heading - mostly rubbish but they have a word on the cover that makes the reader believe that the company that produced the software approves of the content.
2. Certified - This word carries a deceptive suggestion that there is some sort of guarantee (of quality). You have just kept your bum on a seat and read a couple of books - you've been given a seal of approval (and by that most appropriate company Oracle (see 1))
3. Professional - Yet another word with a highly emotional overtone. What's a professional ? clearly someone who is a cut above the rest in some strange indefinable way. This person has done more than sit on a seat, read a book and pass a test, they've entered the upper echelons of 'something'.

OCP deserves to be kicked to death because it is a product whose name
a) promises quality that it doesn't deliver b) is a pure marketing ploy aimed at destroying

   the credibility of any training organisation that    might want to offer Oracle courses.

Consider this, also - I have an M.A. for maths from Oxford University; is someone going to say to me "Your MA isn't worth anything any more - you took it before the 4-colour theory and Fermat's last theorem were proved".
Yet OCP has "DBA 7", "DBA 8", "DBA 9" -
how bad does the education have to be if being taught to be a DBA under version 7 means you cannot possibly be competent
to be a DBA on Oracle 8 without going on another training course. What's wrong with a course on "How to think like a DBA".
OCP is actually advertising the fact that it's courses are rubbish and don't deserve to be considered as proper education !

And does OCP cause other people to miss
out ? Yes, of course it does.

If you have 50 CVs in front of you and
5 of them say OCP, aren't you going to
filter them on the easiest thing to pick out ? Certainly if you are an agency employee
paid by the number of clients you can send a short list to; and absolutely definitely if you are using typical key-word search on electronic CVs / resumes.
Even if you do manage to see

    OCP 8i
compared to

    DBA training course run by xyz ltd.

Which one implies quality (see 1) and has the better chance of shortlisting. I wonder how many people worth seeing never get
past the automatic short-list process because of OCP.

    (Hint - add the words:
    "I decided to avoid OCP as irrelevant"     to your resume/CV
    )

To sum up -
You said "what we have is a baby step". I think you're wrong. We have plenty of training organisations around (at least in the UK we do), and Oracle is just one of them, but the OCP is threatening them because of its name and not because of its quality.

--
Regards

Jonathan Lewis
http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk

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Mike Ault wrote in message
<37fab3ab.0210010717.2769309f_at_posting.google.com>...
>Actually, who would want to be certified as a Novice? Much easier to
>make it levels, like a certified Level 1 DBA is a novice (no hands on,
>no actual test of abilities), Level 2 is an intern (some certified
>hands on experience, a test of the fundamentals in a hands on
>environment) and a Level 3 (years of experience, in depth test of
>hands on ability, letters from employers, their mother and priest from
>the church of their choice stating competence).
>
>What we have now is a baby step towards what we need, let's build on
>it, not destroy it. If we destroy it, no one will want to take on
>Oracle certification efforts again (after 3 failures (Oracle 6 cert by
>Oracle, Oracle 7 cert by Chauncey, and the current program)) perhaps
>push for a certification study group of independent Oracle experts to
>suggest improvements to the current program.
>
>Mike