The Skeptical Informer, September 2007, Volume 1, No. 8

The ITIL certification storm continues to rage. The IT Skeptic blog saw much activity around training and certification this month. How on earth do APMG expect to have any credibility as a training organisation if they violate the most basic principles of adult education? I am no expert but I did half of a post-graduate Certificate in Adult Education before I discovered what lecturers get paid, and I have designed and delivered many IT courses from one to five days long, and I'm shocked by what I see.

Never have I heard a single authorative source suggest that 25 is an appropriate size for a class in a complex technical subject like ITIL.

Nobody in their right mind would consider covering all five ITIL books in three days - no matter how lightly - with people who have no prior exposure to the subject.

And only post-modernist intellectual idiots suggest that multi-choice is an appropriate mechanism for examining practitioners in IT consulting.

But APMG thinks all of these are a good idea. I don't actually think that APMG or the Senior Examiner Panel are stupid people, so that leaves one other option: that all these decisions were taken with a commercial imperative. They are not in the best interest of the students, they are not designed to deliver quality education, they are not intended to ensure competent graduates. It is hard to come to any other conclusion than that these three decisions are taken solely to benefit the vendors of training.

Pack them in at 25 a course to maximise revenues. Keep it down to three days to make it easy to sell. And make all exams multi-choice so we don't have to pay human graders - we can just run it through a machine.

I find this venality appalling, especially because it is so overt. APMG is answerable to no-one but OGC, who never takes a stand on anything except protecting their own copyright. itSMF exists to promote the industry not to represent the user community, so they are not going to pipe up. The industry can just pillage away unchallenged. No wonder the Department of Justice is sniffing around our industry: I can smell the stink from here in New Zealand.