Re: Outrage that OCP exams are now unproctored - Comments?

Nuno Souto <nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam> writes:  

> I do not produce any students. No educational institution here.
> However, I do expect anyone with proper training to be able to read a
> manual and be able to deduce from basic principles acquired while
> studying what the heck is that manual all about. I see none of the sort
> in any1 with just OCP training.
>

while personally, I don't have any opinion on the worth of OCP in itself, there is one way in which I do think it is useful. I've only been working with Oracle (as a developer) for about 18 months. We have 1 DBA. One complaint he has is he does not have enough time to learn about and get up to speed with respect to new features etc in later versions of Oracle. this has been further complicated by the fact he was out of the DBA business for some time and because we have been replacing 3 of our major systems with new ones, so things have been very very flat out for the last 12 months.

He has managed to get an agreement from management that part of my time will now be devoted to DBA training and that time is to be allocated for both of us to study for and sit for the OCP exams. To me, this is probably the biggest advantage of getting OCP status - the employer providing the time to learn and experiment with new features and at the end, they will "feel" they have got something more. While I do believe as professionals it is our responsibility to keep current in our own time, it is nice to have support from your employer in providing time to do this, if for no other reason than it gets you to your end goal faster.

However, the bottom line is that there is no piece of paper which can replace experience and something like OCP status does not really guarantee anything - like any degree or other piece of paper, some of those who have it will be good and others will be hopeless.

Tim

-- 
Tim Cross
The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is
to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you 
really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!