I want you!

A couple of years ago I wrote a tongue-in-cheek article titled "3 reasons to not get certified". My intent, obviously, was to explain in what I considered a humorous way why a person should get certified. One or two of the given reasons for not getting certified might apply to a very few people, but those looking for a real reason to avoid certification would not find it in that article. 

I'd like to revisit the subject, this time from a more practical perspective. To put it bluntly, I want you to be certified. Of course, if I never see you it won't make much difference, but if we're going to work together, I'd like to have some confidence that you know what you're doing. Regardless of whether or not you are certified, it will take time to establish the level of trust that allows both of us to rely on the other.

How did we get here? Membership

In the LinkedIn CSI Leaders group, Joy Davis recently began a series of discussions under the heading #CSIStats. The goal, as expressed in the first post of the series, is "helping CSI leaders understand where CSI stands by sharing facts about the Institute … to help you start and  participate in discussions about who CSI is and where the Institute should go in the future."

Each discussion has started with a few membership statistics about who members are and what they do, followed by links for recommended reading, and a question to start a discussion.

As often happens, each discussion has had a brief flurry of responses, then died. Part of the problem, which affects everything we do, is the limited number of participants. Because this is a locked LinkedIn group, discussion necessarily is limited to members of the group, who number 503. Still, these are by definition leaders of CSI, so it's not a bad place to have a discussion, though it would be good to seek input from the general membership. That is being done through the Institute website, where the posts are available to all. To date, they have garnered a total of three comments. (Contrary to popular belief, posting something to a website does little to get the word out, as few people visit websites except when looking for specific information.)

In Week 4 I posted a few statistics about the discussion.