Using Certification to Prove Home Lab Skills

The open source community is in crisis: There are jobs available at companies that don't understand open source while there are STARs (people Skilled Through Alternate Routes) who possess valuable skills but struggle to prove their competence. Adrianna Frick has spent years working to solve this gap and provide opportunities and paths to connect these two groups.

Long before Adrianna led Canonical's efforts to launch a performance-based technical certification program for Ubuntu, she started as a hobbyist in the open source community in the late 1990s, and has had to prove her self-taught technical "cred" to access opportunities in tech from the dot com era to today. In this talk, she'll guide the community through the technical certification industry's best practices so that the self-taught home lab user will be able to recognize the differences between bad certifications, meaningless certificates, and credentialing programs that will actually provide value.

We'll talk about what to look for in technical certification and course material to determine whether a program is developed with the proper instructional design necessary to provide a valuable assessment of relevant skills in a fast-paced industry.