Survey Report

July 20, 2005 - Survey Report

Press Release     English

July 20, 2005 -- The BSD Certification Group announced today that the report of the results of their recent Task Analysis Survey is publicly available. The survey was initiated in late April and was offered in several languages. Approximately 60 countries had at least one responder and 637 people participated in the survey.

The report covers the purpose and methodology of the survey and includes evaluations of over 200 system administration tasks, proposed testing methods, and certification types and levels.

The BSD Certification Group intends to use the report to develop a certification roadmap, including a curriculum, test methods, and timetable.

"The report and analysis will drive the curriculum development efforts," said Jim Brown, BSD Certification Group member. "We now have a good idea of which system administration tasks are important to members of the BSD community."

"We also have a good feel for how varied the community is in age and experience," said Brown. "These three factors give us quite a bit of room to work in developing the curriculum."

Another one of the goals of this survey is to ensure that the upcoming certification is an accurate, up-to-date and valid measurement of the skills needed by BSD system administrators, said Jeremy C. Reed, member of the BSD Certification Group.

"There were a lot of comments. It was refreshing to read so many different points of view," said Brown. "The community members really had a lot to say on certifications in general and BSD certification in particular."

"One thing that impressed me was the desire for BSD certification to stand out," said Brown.

"They want the certification to be a significant achievement, and have it highly regarded in the industry," Brown said. "Along with that was a desire to see the certification be accessible worldwide."

In order to reduce the size of this comprehensive report, Section 5 of the report contains hyperlinks pointing to separate PDFs of the graphs so readers with limited bandwidth can just download graphs of interest. The report itself is 143 pages and is available as a 2.8 MB PDF. Each hyperlink in Section 5 contains the size of the associated PDF.

Task Analysis Survey Report

About the BSD Certification Group

The BSD Certification Group is comprised of educators, writers and sysadmins who are well versed in and passionate about BSD systems. The group was formed in January 2005 to create a BSD certification program that is recognized as the industry standard for certifying both the knowledge and the ability to perform administrative tasks on BSD systems. The BSD Certification Group website is at http://#