The LPI Difference #5: Serving the Industry
Linux Professional Institute reached its 25th anniversary as a unique organization in support of free and open source software. Although people come to LPI mostly to get professional certifications our work and values go far beyond that.
Open source is special—it calls for different values and activities from other fields. This article is part of a series laying out what makes LPI unique in pursuing its mission “to promote the use of open source by supporting the people who work with it.”
A key difference from similar organizations is LPI’s focus on preparing a workforce for the future, by providing certificates that benefit the open source community in the long run. Our four LPIC-3 certifications cover skills that are relatively rare and where the industry needs significantly more staff. A review of the certification objectives looks like an introduction to modern enterprise computing:
- Our Mixed Environments certification covers the CIFS and Samba file-sharing protocol, along with other multi-system tools.
- Our Security certification covers such critical tasks as hardening systems and networks, penetration testing, and encrypting connections.
- Our Virtualization and Containerization certification covers common open source cloud tools such as Xen and Docker.
- Our High Availability and Storage Clusters certification covers tasks promoting system robustness, such as load balancing and RAID cluster management.
Not many people are skilled enough to qualify for these exams. Still, we offer the certifications because enterprises urgently need to know whether job candidates have mastered these skills, and because the presence of the certifications encourages people to learn the skills. We know that these areas of expertise will take off over upcoming years, and we will be there for the companies and their employees, ready to fill these positions.
We developed the BSD certification in order to promote knowledge of this alternative to GNU/Linux. BSD is not only historically important, but is still found in a wide range of deployments.
Our nonprofessional, introductory certificate in Linux has recently been joined by similar certificates for open source in general, web development, DevOps, and security. We are reaching out to people who don’t have technical jobs in computing, but who need to understand these topics.
For instance, a non-programmer can study for Web Development Essentials as an entry point into other forms of programming. People who have mastered Security Essentials are much more resistant to phishing and other malicious attacks.
In short, we offer these certifications because the industry and our community as a whole benefit from them. The skills they demonstrate are urgently needed, and employers need assurance that the people they hire can carry out the jobs. People who have worked hard to reach these levels of skill should be able to back up their claims with certifications.
LPI also runs surveys to assess the job market in free and open source software. The reports we publish about these surveys help employers, job seekers, and current employees understand what people in the industry find important.
LPI is special because its founders were personally dedicated to the success of open source at a time when it was just beginning to show its strengths, and designed an organization that met open source’s needs. The choices we’ve made, as laid out in this series of articles, flow naturally from that dedication. And in the long run, these values are needed for success by aspiring professionals and the entire open source community.
About Andrew Oram:
