During the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCALE) 5x's mini-conference on women in open source software, BSD Certification Group member Dru Lavigne put forth the idea that free/open source software provided an excellent opportunity to inexpensively change one's career path. Since this is an idea that has not been widely explored, Dru took some time to talk to me about it, as well as provide an update on the BSD system administrator certification program that is currently in development.

So what exactly do you mean when you say that open source should be marketed as a career path?

Dru Lavigne: I think open source provides the opportunity to bypass some of the barriers if you're entering the career market or if you're looking at changing your career path, because if you look at the biggest obstacles -- typically a large obstacle is having the time and money to get whatever training you need. It's easier when you're younger and go to university, and so would have the resources to do so, but definitely once you've entered the workforce it's a major commitment to do a career path change.

Another big obstacle -- especially if you're just starting out -- is experience. Every employer wants employees who have prior experience, but how do you get that? With open source software, you can learn whatever skills you're looking for. There are already people who know how to do what you want to, and there are people who are at the same level as you and can understand what you're going through and help you through it. The people who get ahead in their careers are the ones who have mentors, and the open source community is full of available mentors. You can find someone who is at the level that you want to be on that you have sort of a natural communication style with. The mentorship can be indirect -- you can just watch what they do and learn from them, or depending upon the community, if you're using communication methods like IRC or instant messaging, you can have a real-life conversation with them. They can walk you through technical things, offer advice... for instance, people approach me and say that they're thinking of doing something and want to know if their idea would be appreciated, or they want to know how I learned to do what I do. People who can help are out there -- you just have to go out and find them for yourself.

How did you apply this to your own career path?

DL: In my thirties I decided to do a career change and the reason why was because of the glass ceiling. And so I'd already been in the career world for over ten years...

Glass ceiling of which industry?

DL: Lots of industries. I was in municipal government, which has the worst glass ceiling you'll ever see. I also was in other male-dominated fields -- I did stints as a construction worker, I owned my own moving company -- that sort of thing. And... at the point where I decided to do the career change is when I was working in municipal government and the CEO was a sexist. So if you're a woman, you shall be a receptionist and you'll never make more than $20,000 per year. My senior manager actually provided the opportunity for me to work part time so I could go back to school -- he knew I was wasting my time there.

So you got into FreeBSD initially.

DL: Yeah. So I had already been in school a year and a half, I was getting close to graduation -- it was a 2-year program -- and I started to look around and see what positions were available. The only ones that sounded like more than "help desk" required Unix experience. At that point I didn't even know what Unix was, but I knew I could go to Google and ask, so I typed in "free unix" and the first place I ended up was FreeBSD.org.

So now you're in the BSD Certification Group, right?

DL: Yeah.

And that's actually a system administrator's certification.

DL: Correct. We've been talking at conferences about it since we launched... going on two and a half years now. On the first day we talked about it in a public forum, we were absolutely shocked that people asked, "When's the development exam coming up?" We thought there was absolutely no need for that -- the whole open source development process is basically there to showcase your code. You have publically archived CVS repositories where anybody can search for your name and find everything you've ever done, whereas as a sysadmin, how do you prove your skills? You can maintain a server for your user group, but that's not a big deal on a resume and it's certainly not going to prove that as a sysadmin you know what guidelines you should be thinking about when you set up a system. The idea is that the person after me doesn't have to figure things out or fix any mistakes I made. So there should be established guidelines that sysadmins should follow, and everything that's out there now is for Linux or Unix systems. There's a lot of BSD terminology that's different from Linux terminology -- we do the same things, yet we have different tools and different names for what it is we're doing.

Is it a general certification, or for a specific BSD project?

DL: One of the things we also discovered as part of creating the certification is -- you have to figure out what employers are actually looking for in terms of skill sets -- when we did this survey to figure out what that was, it was very obvious that there were 2 distinct audiences: there was one for people who wanted to enter system administration for BSD systems, and the other was for people who were already established and wanted a more senior position. So we started with the junior group, and we thought it was very important that somebody who is training in this situation is learning from somebody higher up, and is expected to end up with a certain amount of knowledge. When you're at that level you're not making design decisions as in "this is the BSD we're going to use and this is how we're going to implement the environment." You're basically stuck with administering whatever is already there, and there is enough difference between the BSDs -- even on a setup level -- that the install routines are different, the ifconfig and how to set up networking is different. If I say I'm BSD certified, and I can work on a FreeBSD box but I don't know where to start on an OpenBSD box, that's not very encouraging for people who want to hire somebody. So we found it was important to let them know that there's more than one BSD out there, and to let them know what capabilities are built into each of the BSDs. For the very basics, make sure they know how to do it for all four [Open/Free/Net/DragonFly] BSDs.

Do you think that the BSD certification will attain the level of respect that other certs like Red Hat have? Some have gained momentum over time and mean more now, others like MCSE have gone downhill over the years and lost respect -- it means basically nothing. What level would you say the BSD certification will be?

DL: Before I say that, if we're talking about how people think about certification, there are two things you need to think about. One is when certifications came out in the early 90s from the vendors, they did it for the sole purpose of marketing their products. Basically it was to create their own built-in technical sales force to tell people what features come with the product. That was the motivation behind it. The other thing that evolved out of that is that it actually hit a critical mass where, because training provides that, it opens up more support options. So because you have trained people, you can provide support -- it's built into it -- and things actually hit the point where if you don't have a certification, the connotation is, "where is your support?" That's something that open source software has to -- if they're playing with the big vendors -- it's something they have to address.

I guess I had confused software certifications like The Open Group's UNIX certification with human certifications.

DL: I've been teaching vendor certs since the mid-90s, and that's the sole purpose. Especially when you're dealing with training material, it's basically a marketing brochure.

And you pay a lot of money for it, too.

DL: Exactly. And you might find that the product doesn't actually do what the certification training said it would.

So that's the first thing. The second thing comes with the sort of respect that comes with the certification. All certifications, both the vendors and the open source ones -- which basically had to play the vendor game because that was the only game out there -- had to play by certain rules. They suffered from the disjoint between what you'd get at university or college training where you get a better idea of the larger software world, you have a context of other products out there that do the same thing, but this is how this particular one does it. One of the fundamental problems of IT certification is, you are narrowing your focus to a specific product, a specific version, to say, "I know how to do this," and you're losing context. The more context you lose, and the more vendor sales-y it seems, the less respect there is. I see that as the real problem even though the problem that people focus on is there's no respect because people can cram and then take the exam. That's a symptom of the problem is that there's no context -- if I can narrowly focus down the to the 50 questions they're going to ask me, I can pass the exam. You cant get more narrowly focused than that.

And there are study guides you can buy...

DL: Exactly -- it's just reworded exam questions. One of the things we felt when we went to approach this was, looking at what exists now, do we want to play that game, and do we have the ability to change the rules of the game? Open source is totally different -- can we do this the open source way? As an IT instructor, I won't teach the BSDA because I can't turn you into a sysadmin in 40 hours, which is basically what a training program would do. What I'd prefer to see is the BSDA exam objectives incorporated into a larger university or college degree program where this is a set of guidelines. The other problem we get at a university or college level is often they are theoretical. Your teacher hasn't gone out and done sysadmin stuff. In a college, usually you'd go set up the lab, so you would have some limited sysadmin experience, but it's not the same thing as someone with real industry experience. I think it's important that people who do have experience as sysadmins set the guidelines, so that they can say, "when you're out in the real world you have to be able to do this or that."

My neighbor went through something similar -- he's a videographer, and has a lot of industry experience. He decided to go to college to get an official degree to match his career experience, and found that what was being taught in the classroom was inaccurate and had little to do with the way videos are actually produced.

DL: If anything is going to have an opportunity to make some kind of bridge between reality and what happens in school, it's going to be something that's open source, and grassroots-level. These are the people who are actually out there saying, "people who are coming in to be hired don't have these skills." If they can actually pass this certification, it means they had to learn these skills before they could do so.

One of the biggest areas that closes the door on open source projects to offer their own training is cost. Forget the cost of finding the people who will volunteer time to put something together. What happened in the 90s was that there were quite a few software products that could actually deliver exams over the Internet, and all of them were bought or pushed out of the market by two companies. Their annual revenue is more than $6 billion per year, so we're playing with the big boys. Just to use their services, they charge an annual fee, and you have to talk to salespeople to get the actual cost, but a ballpark figure is at least $75,000 per year. Find me an OSS project that has enough financial backing behind it to offer maybe the hundred exams that they expect people to take that year to pay that amount -- and that's just the initial costs, there are also additional costs. One of the things that helped make this all make more sense to me -- I've written and taught dozens of certifications -- is I've always wondered, "this exam is three years old -- it has the same questions it had three years ago. How come they haven't changed anything?" One of the reasons is, every time you change the exam, there's a publication fee in addition to your initial $75,000. If you need a translation -- any time you want to do anything, it costs you money.

We worked all the way around this -- other open source certifications are out there ahead of us that helped break the ice -- LPI, Zend, Linux CompTIA -- they have all struggled with the same thing. Do they raise the funds and get financial backing to do that? All of them have come up with the idea that they should make an alternative testing software framework, but for whatever reason, that didn't pan out. We got pushed into the wall -- we had no choice but to make an alternative, so we've decided if we're going to do that, we're going to do it the open source way. We're going to have a publically available code repository with our design specs and goals. If you want, you can be part of the process, and it'll be under the BSD license. Hopefully we'll open the door for other open source programs to provide their own certifications with this software, but there are also lots of small companies that may want to train their employees and can't afford the other programs.

When will the certification software be finished?

DL: We started the repository to get some code into it before we publically announce it so that we can show we're working on something. We'd like to have our first beta by BSDcan in May. We'll see what happens; if I've learned anything throughout this process, it's that everything takes longer than you think.

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