Certification of Computer Programming Skills

CERTIFICATION OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING SKILLS

Nowadays, there are many institutes and centres offerring courses in computer programming. But it becomes difficult to judge the standard of training maintained by those institutes and acceptability of students in the business, who complete the courses from such institutes.

The simplest way is to judge the reputation of respective institutes among the employer companies.
Another way is to rely on the government recognition and university affiliation.
The third way is DOE-ACC (in India) accreditation to courses.

The DOE-ACC has established four levels of computer courses viz. O, A, B and C level. The O level indicates elementary or entry level course. The A level indicates an intermediate level course. The B level refers to undergraduate level i.e. equivalent to bachelor's degree programme of a recognized university. The last i.e. C level refers to graduate level i.e. equivalent to master's degree programme of a recognized university. But these are indications of overall level of those courses. Those don't give any guideline on how much a person is competent in a particular programming language, e.g. Visual Basic or C language. Therefore, it becomes difficult to judge the suitability of a person for a particular project, requiring particular skills in a particular language. We shall now discuss this in depth.

Let us take an example of Visual Basic or C languages. I have identified following specialities of skill for programming in these languages.

Elements of programming -- variables, constants, loops, conditions, subroutines etc.
Building user interfaces with multiple document interfaces
Building applications without databases
Building applications with databases like Access
Building applications with ISAM databases like Fox Pro
Building applications with RDBMS like SQL Server
Building applications with RDBMS like Oracle
Programming for taking text print-outs from within the applications
Programming for generating & printing graphical reports within the applications
Programming for graphics within the applications
Use of DAO, RDO, ODBC, ADO, OLEDB, COM in database programming
Use of SQLs in database programming
Programming for device drivers
Executing Windows API calls from within the applications
Operating System (Kernel or chip level) programming
Programming for taking backup and restoring the data from backup from within the applications
Programming for use of internet and e-mail from within the applications
System analysis and system design

There could be more specialities also for these two languages. Whenever a person claims that he / she can do programming in VB or C, the persons who want to hire his / her services, find it difficult to ascertain his / her skill in one or more of the above mentioned specialities.

It is precisely here, that a method is required for common or universal recognition of the skills of a person in one or more such specialities. This can be done by way of a common examination and subsequently mentioning a list of specialities in their certificates, in which the persons prove their skills. These specialities will essentially vary from one programming language to other.

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This article was first written on 2003 / 10 / 04. However, it is published as a web page and is last updated on 2004-03-02, 19-00 hours (Indian time)

(C) Ajay Phalnikar, Trade marks of respective companies / corporate bodies are acknowledged. Those trade marks, trade names and the names of certifying bodies are referred to only for the purpose of clarifying the new viewpoint beind suggested certification scheme.