An Interview with Chuck Mead
Chuck Mead, the new president of Linux Professional
Institute (LPI) was kind enough to spend time with us during Linux
World Expo in San Francisco on August 27, 2001. Chuck is a leader
in the Linux Community and a veteran in IT circles. He provided
candid insights into the current status and future of Linux certification.
CM = Chuck Mead
LC = LinuxCertified
LC: Let me first start
with congratulating you on your appointment as the president
of LPI. When we talked to Dan York about one year ago, LPI was
finishing up formation of Level 1 exams and starting on Level
2 exams. Can you comment on progress made during last year,
and current state of affairs.
CM: Thanks! During the
last year LPI has made tremendous strides. Recently we announced
that our beta exam for Level 2 will be started in September.
I'd like to send out some big time kudos to our Director of
Exam Development, Kara Pritchard, and to our Psychometrician,
Alan Mead (no relation by the way... though we are good friends).
They've done a fantastic job planning and executing the development
of Level 2 and they deserve to be congratulated! I'd also like
to say a big thank you to all the volunteers from around the
world who helped with Level 2, we really appreciate their hard
work and we couldn't have done it without them!
It may seem like we bit off more than we could chew, but at
the same time we've been finishing up Level 2 we've started
updating Level 1 and we should be able to finish that before
the end of the year as well. Our plans for Level 1 may have
been a bit ambitious (grin) especially since we'd hoped to be
finished by now but the work continues and now that Level 2
is in the can the Level 1 update should accelerate a bit. I
need to send a big time thank you to Tom Peters for his work
leading the Level 1 update. That's a role I had planned to take
myself but Dan's leaving put me into a different pair of shoes!
Tom stepped up and has done a marvelous job. Hey... since the
Level 1 update is still ongoing let me give it a plug... anybody
wanting to help out should contact tom@lpi.org. I promise he's
got work for anybody that wants to volunteer! :-) See the URL:
http://news.lpi.org/stories.php?story=01/08/07/8550931
for more information about what's happening.
LC: What is your current estimate
of number of folks attempting LPI exams every month? Is LPI
Level 1 gaining momentum?
CM: I am glad you asked that. During
the middle of last spring I was concerned that demand might
be leveling off but it wasn't so! Looking back at the last 3
months it's clear that demand for LPI's tests is increasing.
Last month we delivered almost 700 exams, globally, and this
month we're on track to exceed that mark by quite a bit. My
goal for us is to be over a thousand a month in early 2002 and
I think we're on track for that.
LC: Tell us more about LPI Level
2 exams. Who is the target for these exams?
CM: Okay... as it says on our web site at http://www.lpi.org/c-process.html,
the target for Level 2 must be able to do the following tasks:
Don't take this as the "end all be all" for the
target specification though. The serious student will want
to make an examination of our Level 2 objectives:
http://www.lpi.org/p-L2-obj-pre.html.
I know that page says it's a draft but the only thing that
might change now is the numbering, the content is pretty well
set, at this point.
LC: Will LPI offer specialist certifications in future, e.g.
Linux security etc.?
CM:That's been our plan from the beginning... our intent for
Level 3 has always been that it would consist of areas of
specialization and I think what we've done and what we're
planning, mirrors the career path of a typical Linux admin.
Start out green and junior (LPIC1) while you learn
from the older heads, advance into the middle of your career
(LPIC2) as your skills mature and then later, whether you
like it or not you become a bit of a gray beard (LPIC3) with
specialized skills.
We have some possible examples of what LPIC 3 may be like
listed at
http://www.lpi.org/c-process.html
so I'm not going to quote them, they're only examples but
it's a safe bet that LPIC 3 will be a pair of very specialized
exams.
LC: CompTIA is going to start offering Linux+ exam. Is this going
to overlap with LPI level 1 exam?
CM: Now *that's* an interesting question! :-) I'm happy to answer
it... We worked with Comptia for a long time to ensure that
Linux+ did not overlap substantively with LPIC1 and I'm quite
pleased to report that that's the way that it turned out.
What we have in Linux+ is an excellent "beginning Linux"
test and it also tracks perfectly as a feeder into LPIC1.
To give you a clearer picture of how long that effort took and how serious we were about making sure that Linux+ benefited the community, you have to understand that board members of LPI were having discussions with Comptia (and internal wrestling matches between LPI board members :-) all the way back in the spring and summer of 1999 so it's been a long haul for us. But... now that it's done I couldn't be happier about the way it's turned out!
One of the most difficult things for us is the regular care and feeding of our communication lines. We know LPI isn't always the top priority in people's days so we've been trying to come up with new ways to keep our community updated on our progress. We have a newsletter which we send out monthly (those wanting to subscribe should go here: http://www.lpi.org/listar/lsg2
and subscribe to the lpi-announce mailing list) and we've recently set up a couple of sub-domains to try and help us do a better job of staying in touch... one of them is for our Alumni (LPIC1 or above; at http://alumni.lpi.org) and the other is of more general interest (http://news.lpi.org).
Oh... also... one of my pet peeves... there are people out there who take tests really well and might try to challenge our tests after doing some reading but never having any hands on experience...
Please... LPI is a non-profit for a reason... we didn't want to have to make money that badly... don't do it! A case in point was an email exchange I read yesterday where a person preparing to take our exams made it clear by their questions that they had never even installed Linux, much less tried to administer it. The respondent made it clear what they thought about that and so will I... it's silly. If you're a newbie and you want to take our tests, at least run Linux on a home system so you can get your hands on it! If you don't want to buy a boxed set you can download just about every version available from here: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/
