Ascential Certification

[dsxdev]

Hi All,
Please share information whethere Ascential has any Certification program on DataStage PX and eligibility criteria and fee, etc.

[ArndW]

Although Ascential announced such a program, I don't know how far they have come along. I've now sent 3 separate e-mails to the certification email address and I haven't gotten a reply. The e-mail address they put on their web pages is "Certification@AscentialSoftware.com." and the blurb on ADN reads:

Ascential Software is pleased to announce plans to develop a comprehensive certification program for customers and partners. This 3-tiered program will be aimed at companies who want to validate the skill sets of their practitioners who implement their Ascential Software solution. The 3-tiers of certification will be the Ascential Authorized Developer, the Ascential Certified Professional, and the Enterprise Expert Practitioner. Each level will build upon the previous level with a series of exams and practical knowledge requirements. Initial exams in the Ascential Authorized Developer category should be available in late Q4 2004. Please check this page regularly for updates on the program. In addition, those wanting more information or more frequent updates, please email your request to Certification@AscentialSoftware.com.

[roy]

Hi,
Late last year I attended a course at Ascential FR.
They said it sould be available eventually as a 1 day activity, for those who want it; though they knew not of a specific date they guessed not befor 2005

I guess with all that has happened maybe the plans were changed / postponed .

Keeping in mind IBM have Certifications for their products I guess it's only a matter of time.
The down side of it now being IBM Webspheer .... is will it mean learning that "spheerical web" (j/k) as well, and to what extent???

I hope that will not "eclipse" our knowledge

Thinking:
argh they'll never send me for certification anyway

[vmcburney]

The Ascential certification program has gone the same way as the Ascential Blog network and the Ascential devnet. It is a good idea to start with, there is a lot of activity and announcements, after a few weeks it is dead in the water. The blog network had several weeks of posts but has been stagnent for a month. Devnet has an announcement page that is six months old and the post volume has been going down. The certification program is six months late with no new announcements. e.services was stagant for a while but improved recently.

Fortunately Ascential are better at core development activities. While fringe projects move in fits and starts the products are always improving.

[ray.wurlod]

IBM Certified Solutions Developer
Websphere IM DataStage Enterprise Edition

Test Purpose

This test will certify that the successful candidate has the skills and knowledge necessary to professionally design and develop an efficient and scalable DataStage solution to a complex enterprise level business problem; configure a scalable parallel environment including clustered and distributed configurations; collect, report on and resolve issues identified through key application performance indicators; and be proficient in extending the capabilities of the parallel framework using the provided APIs (buildops, wrappers and components).

A Brief Overview of Exam Objectives

1. Installation and Configuration

• describe how to properly install and configure DataStage Enterprise Edition
  identify tasks required to create and configure projects in DataStage jobs

2. Metadata

• demonstrate knowledge of Orchestrate schema
  demonstrate knowledge of runtime column propagation

3. Persistent Storage

• explain the process of importing/exporting data to/from a framework
  describe the proper usage of FileSets and DataSets

4. Parallel Architecture

• demonstrate proper use of data partitioning and collecting
  demonstrate knowledge of parallel execution

5. Databases

• demonstrate proper selection of databases stages and specific stage properties
  demonstrate knowledge of working with NLS database sources and targets

6. Data Transformation

• demonstrate knowledge of default type conversions, mappings and warnings
  demonstrate proper selection of Transformer stage vs other stages

7. Combining and Sorting Data

• demonstrate knowledge of Join, Lookup and Merge stages
  demonstrate understanding of Aggregator stage

8. Automation and Production Deployment

• use parameters to simplify the creation and maintenance of jobs
  demonstrate the ability to use job sequencers

9. Monitor and Troubleshoot

• demonstrate knowledge of parallel job scores
  identify and define environment variables that control DataStage EE

10. Job Design

• demonstrate knowledge of shared containers
  demonstrate knowledge of how to create restart points

There will be an email address from which a complete listing of all exam objectives can be obtained. This will be advised in the near future and posted here.

How It Will Work

The test will be delivered in the same way as other IBM certification exams, through third-party providers such as ProMetrics. There will be a fee (to be determined). You will not be permitted to take the same exam more than twice in a 30 day period nor more than three times in a 60 day period.
You will receive a "report card" stating, for each of the ten major objectives, how many items you faced and how many you got correct. The pass/fail criterion is an overall total correct (again, to be determined). It will be possible to pass (= be certified) even with 0 correct in one major objective; however employers may ask to see the report card and evidence of classes taken to remediate the deficiencies.

Practice Exams and Preparation Classes

We have no news on this at this time. It seems unlikely that there will be enough items in the pool for IBM to be able to provide any practice exam at the time of first release (February 2006?). Some vendors are presently in discussion with IBM about providing classes to prepare candidates for the certification exam; currently these negotiations are in confidence between those vendors and IBM.

[balajisr]

Thanks Ray for this useful information.

[vmcburney]

Looks like a wide exam scope. I find myself loathing the idea of memorising all the EE environment variables! Hopefully they will just test on the commonly used ones such as config file, combine operators and tracing. Some notable exclusions are job control BASIC, version control tool and the XML input and output stages.

They are now owned by IBM who encourage certification so hopefully we will see an exam for TX soon.

[pavankvk]

ray,

i am unable to find a link on IBM site for this test..can u provide me please?

[vmcburney]

This certification hasn't been posted onto the IBM web site yet. We are privilaged to have Ray and his contacts available to give us a preview of the exam description before the official announcement has been made. We may be waiting a few more weeks before the launch.

[ray.wurlod]

Items will have a range of difficulty and be presented as multiple choice, probably with four choices per item. The only feedback given will be whether the choice selected was correct or not. It is envisaged that a typical exam will contain 75 questions and have a time limit of 90 minutes.

There was a demonstration set at II Live (done in Powerpoint), containing five questions only. Detailed objectives for the exam are presently being reviewed - the items were developed in conjunction with a rewrite of the DataStage EE classes. After that a statistical process called "norming" must be applied to the items to determine the level of difficulty of each, so that a balanced exam can be presented to all candidates. IBM has people whose primary role is certification working on this along with subject matter experts, so hopefully the exam will be a good one.

It is not their intention to make it so difficult that no-one can get certified. It is, however, their intention to make sure that, without proper study and/or tranining and/or experience, it would be almost impossible to become certified.