Accreditations and CPD in development

Sparks

ChRoMe wrote: »

So the learning decisions I make are based on their ability to increase my salary not their academic value.

I think there's something interesting that we're missing in all of this and that is being hinted at in comments like that - and that's how you approach CPD and what your end goals for it are.

I mean, do you have any sort of accreditation in mind or are you just learning to keep up with the pace in the office?

ChRoMe

Sparks wrote: »

I think there's something interesting that we're missing in all of this and that is being hinted at in comments like that - and that's how you approach CPD and what your end goals for it are.

I mean, do you have any sort of accreditation in mind or are you just learning to keep up with the pace in the office?

I have absolutely no interest in accreditations.up to a year ago The only educational qualification i had to my name was a sub 200 point leaving cert.

Sparks

Just splitting this topic out into a seperate thread because it's something that I think deserves some independent discussion.

Anyone else have accreditation in mind, either short-term or long-term, academic or industrial, or for that matter, any other kind of goals (long-term or short-term) when they think of CPD?

KonFusion

Sparks wrote: »

Anyone else have accreditation in mind, either short-term or long-term, academic or industrial, or for that matter, any other kind of goals (long-term or short-term) when they think of CPD?

As soon as I left college, I started a Hdip, as soon as I finish this, I'm thinking of doing a masters. Soon as I finish that, I will most certainly formally study something else in an unrelated field (I'm thinking economics).

Maybe I've got some sort of "Animal House" syndrome :pac: (maybe that's the wrong movie) and I'm just afraid to leave college. My motivations however are not professional driven. Purely personal. And are not driven by the titles or accreditation I receive either.

I find I really can't learn something if I don't find it fun/interesting. Or perhaps more accurate to say that I don't even bother to motivate myself. So I'm fortunate that I enjoy what I do, but god help me if there comes a time when I no longer enjoy it.

If it was something I didn't want to but had to study, to keep up with the pace in the office as you say, I think I'd fail horridly.

I'm in a 'trendy web shop' though, so I'm pretty oblivious to what would be expected of me should I find myself employed by a fortune 500 company or the like where CPD and new accreditation would be expected? (Is it generally expected?).

Though now I think, if I had to study something I didn't want to study, but would increase my possible 'fun', I dunno what I'd do.

Just realised that post was a bit of a ramble...Might have missed the point of the thread? :pac:

TLDR: Yup, short term and long term. You looking for specifics?

Sparks

KonFusion wrote: »

You looking for specifics?

Yup, kindof

KonFusion

Sparks wrote: »

Yup, kindof

:pac:

Totally missed the point of the thread

Erh.... Zend certification comes to mind.

I find it's hard to know what's worthwhile though. And possibly harder to know what will convey that you're a competent and worthwhile hire, rather than just someone who's ticked a box on the learning tree.

I'm probably still thinking too macro though. I'm just going to slip away out of this thread now....





*sound of door closing*

Evil Phil

Submitting my thesis for my MSc. tomorrow (and yet here I am faffing on boards.ie :pac:) which is the result of over 2 years work. That's been a long term goal for quite a number of years so I'm going to take it easy for a while in terms of accreditation or certification. I'm going to take a couple MOOCs that I've been putting off, while not accredited they are definitely CPD.

For me my MSc. is not salary based, it gives me change to start specializing in something outside of specializing as a developer. Job applications that list of languages and technologies without details of what's being developed are something I don't bother to finish reading.

I think that as I turn 40 this is important for me as project manager, while lucrative, isn't the most exciting option for my career and I find it unmotivating work. It seems that in development you get to point where you career needs to take a next step and the default path is developer->senior developer->team lead->project manager. A demonstrable CPD plan helps one to step of this path into something else.

Sparks

Congrats Phil!

I suppose I should ante up as well, I'm in the middle of going for a C.Eng at the moment. Which is not exactly a well-known accreditation in the IT industry (and yet, a surprisingly large number of people have the prerequisites for it - CS students from TCD who graduated before 2013, for example).

After that, I was pondering the MAI degree from TCD, because the last time I looked at it, there was an option to obtain it the same way you get the C.Eng - a practice report - rather than having to do research or courses on a full-time or part-time basis. There's also the option of doing a PhD by article (which is a new one to me that I'm only now learning about) where instead of doing several years of research and getting the PhD on the basis of a dissertation on that research, you publish articles in peer-reviewed journals (something that requires research, it's not quite a "what I did on my summer holidays" sort of thing) and when you have enough (four or five) you prepare a dissertation using them and submit it. Still several years work, but more doable than full-time research - in my case, I could easily use the research as CPD work, for example.

The thing is - and this is why I spun off the thread to begin with - there doesn't seem to be any standard progressions in all of this, it seems to be very individual. So I was wondering what other individuals were doing. Are we all individuals?

Johnny Jukebox

Evil Phil wrote: »

I think that as I turn 40 this is important for me as project manager, while lucrative, isn't the most exciting option for my career and I find it unmotivating work. It seems that in development you get to point where you career needs to take a next step and the default path is developer->senior developer->team lead->project manager. A demonstrable CPD plan helps one to step of this path into something else.

Well, I'm considerably more than 40 and am at

developer->architect->failed entreprenuer->highly paid contractor

My approach to CPD is aggressive and I am slowly but surely gaining mainstream certifications around Spring, Oracle etc and some more product specific ones like Asterisk. Sure, it doesn't prove much at the end of the day but it speeds up the interview process in my experience.

ChRoMe

Johnny Jukebox wrote: »

developer->architect->failed entreprenuer->highly paid contractor

Johnny Jukebox wrote: »

Sure, it doesn't prove much at the end of the day but it speeds up the interview process in my experience.

[/QUOTE]
Your path sounds more fun (and profitable). I've found so far that having an actual pet project to demo rather than a cert works quite well.

Evil Phil

I do find that the certification path, be it academic, professional, or proprietary helps me to learn. Even if I don't plan on taking the assessments it gives structure to my studies. One benefit of my MSc course is it's given me skills to do that with a less formal, self-driven approach.

fergalr

Sparks wrote: »

Anyone else have accreditation in mind, either short-term or long-term, academic or industrial, or for that matter, any other kind of goals (long-term or short-term) when they think of CPD?

I always find 'CPD' a strange thing to break out as its own concept.

The status-quo of the tech industry is to constantly be learning and developing; so the whole idea from some professional disciplines that you spend N days a year doing CPD, seems very strange to me.

Sparks wrote: »

Congrats Phil!

I suppose I should ante up as well, I'm in the middle of going for a C.Eng at the moment. Which is not exactly a well-known accreditation in the IT industry (and yet, a surprisingly large number of people have the prerequisites for it - CS students from TCD who graduated before 2013, for example).

I'm one of that group (TCD CS 04) and I remember thinking about the C.Eng after graduating.

I got the material from the IEI, and looked at the process.
I was in a contracting startup at the time, founded with some fellow grads. No senior engineer was on staff to act as the mentor, and easily fulfill the IEI requirements. Now, I believe we learned a lot more, going in the deep end as we did, than we would have from being in a large organisation with a 'senior engineer' to act as mentor; but that wasn't a recognised pathway.

I received e-mails about expensive courses that counted towards 'approved' CPD credits, but none of them seemed relevant to software engineering. To make a long story short, the whole C.Eng setup just seemed unsuitable. I concluded it just wasnt a good fit for software engineering, and I wouldn't go back to it; don't see the relevance.

Sparks wrote: »

After that, I was pondering the MAI degree from TCD, because the last time I looked at it, there was an option to obtain it the same way you get the C.Eng - a practice report - rather than having to do research or courses on a full-time or part-time basis. There's also the option of doing a PhD by article (which is a new one to me that I'm only now learning about) where instead of doing several years of research and getting the PhD on the basis of a dissertation on that research, you publish articles in peer-reviewed journals (something that requires research, it's not quite a "what I did on my summer holidays" sort of thing) and when you have enough (four or five) you prepare a dissertation using them and submit it. Still several years work, but more doable than full-time research - in my case, I could easily use the research as CPD work, for example.

I would advise some caution here. There are 'PhDs by publication' and there are 'articles-based theses', and these mean different things in different places. Often the former is retrospective, whereas the latter is simply one way of preparing a thesis manuscript, and is still assessed quite searchingly.

I'll be defending an articles thesis in CS in UCD shortly, and I would not like to have signed up to do it part-time. I wouldn't estimate it as any less work than a monograph - maybe a little less editing work at the end, in the write-up. And it has some additional complications to compensate - such as the difficulty of tieing papers published in diverse places into a single coherent piece of work - as well the risk that external examiners will take issue with the novel format. And towards the end of a phd, reducing risk is a big concern. (As well as at the start and in the middle!).

Sparks wrote: »

The thing is - and this is why I spun off the thread to begin with - there doesn't seem to be any standard progressions in all of this, it seems to be very individual. So I was wondering what other individuals were doing.

Personally, I'll be taking a bit of a break from education for a while, and focusing on my new startup, which has been plenty educational already. I'd consider trying to do something like the RSS stats exams in future, or a part time course in math. But really, coursera et al. seem like they are going to serve cases like this pretty well in future (i.e. when you want extra education, just for the sake of learning, rather than credentialing).

I don't think doing technology specific credentials makes a lot of sense to me - individual libraries and technologies change so rapidly, I'm not sure its a good investment of time. Its vital to think about the 'half-life' of any skills or credentials you dedicate time to, when managing a career in software; there's an interesting portfolio-optimisation problem in there somewhere...

Sparks

fergalr wrote: »

I always find 'CPD' a strange thing to break out as its own concept.
The status-quo of the tech industry is to constantly be learning and developing; so the whole idea from some professional disciplines that you spend N days a year doing CPD, seems very strange to me.

Not so much; it's just that we do more of it, less formally, than other branches of engineering.

To make a long story short, the whole C.Eng setup just seemed unsuitable. I concluded it just wasnt a good fit for software engineering, and I wouldn't go back to it; don't see the relevance.

I don't see it as being a technical accreditation though; more a professional one - in other words, it doesn't say you can use technology X, it says you've been working in industry for a sufficient length of time and at a sufficiently high level, that you can be considered a professional engineer. Looked at from that point of view, it's hard to understand why we don't see it more often in our industry because that tends to be the main thing you're trying to figure out when interviewing a new hire...

I would advise some caution here.

Always a wise bit of advice. I did spend an hour talking through it with a senior professor who's taken a few people (okay, more than a few) successfully through the process, and going through the ins and outs of it. And I did spend a good few years pursuing a PhD by research, but got beaten to publication with the first topic and ran out of funding on the second. I'm loathe to walk away from it after that much invested time (especially since nobody's published on my second topic yet), and the PhD-by-article route seems a doable approach for where I am at the moment. First things first though, and the C.Eng.

Evil Phil

Anyone got a link explaining c.eng?

Sparks

http://www.engineersireland.ie/membership/registered-titles/chartered.aspx