I was invited to post material of interest to CAD and Geographic Information System practitioners, although I'm sure much of this material will sound hauntingly familiar to other high tech professionals. Your comments will be apprecciated.

Another Look at GIS Certification.

It goes without saying that any employer might look favorably on a job applicant with a document in his or her possession which was evidence of specialized training for the work being applied for. Not only is it a sign of officially recognized minimum competency, but it argues that the applicant has gone the extra mile in order to prepare for a career. Neither could anyone blame an individual who chose to add to the occupational milestones in their resume. The recent proliferation of Geographic Information System training programs for newcomers to the field serves a useful purpose, to supplement and complement formal education and on-the-job experience in the field. The diplomas offered as evidence of successful completion of one of these courses provide benefits to both employee and employer, provided they are not abused by hiring bureaucracies and used solely to justify salary cuts for the undocumented. The economic value of this paper will be determined by the reputation of the institution which grants it, based on the excellence of its training program. Over time, the free market will sort them all out and the programs will rank themselves accordingly. Those that don't make the grade will simply go away.

But if you mention "GIS Certification" to someone in our field today, this form of certificate will not be what is understood. The term has come to mean something very different, a document signifying acceptance by an organization, not proof of completion of a program. It is a credential which says the holder has other credentials, whether education, experience, testimonials, references, professional activity, contributions and, perhaps, successful completion of an examination. In my opinion, these certificates will quickly evolve into a de facto prerequisite for employment, and perhaps even the precursor to a government licence or registration. They will reflect arbitrary, and perhaps self-serving, standards devised by an issuing authority answerable to no one, and will not be subject to the control or supervision of any market mechanism. Those who are critical of these programs will be forced to place themselves in public opposition to organizations which could potentially deny them access to their livelihood. The agents administering these certificate programs, however benign, will be faced with a substantial conflict of interest; they will be resistant to any change which may negatively affect their programs. Once a scheme like this takes hold, it will adopt a life of its own and it will be difficult to reform even should its participants start having second thoughts; it will give too many advantages to those who have it as well as the means of excluding those who don't.

Competency documentation is normally reserved for those disciplines which serve the consumer (as opposed to organizations) or those which carry a potential risk of fraud, public hazard or property damage. We expect ship's masters, airline pilots and hair dressers to have some sort of paper over and above their educational diplomas, but most other "professional" careers (in quotes here since it means different things to different people) have no such requirement, even in those cases where tradition demands a high level of formal training. I cannot conceive of astrophysicists or zoologists awarding themselves certificates in addition to their academic credentials. In fact, I imagine they would consider even the suggestion somewhat ridiculous, if not downright insulting. In a university research community it is not uncommon to see physicists doing chemistry, or mathematicians practicing astronomy, and so on. Some fields, such as paleontology, are often dominated by people with degrees in related areas, since few institutions may offer PhDs in such disciplines. This sort of cross-fertilization is wholesome and essential for innovation in any field and certification only complicates the process. After all, most people don't hire biologists or geologists without a university degree, but it is still not a legal or guild requirement for either to have one. The idea of certification often implies a narrow technical or administrative specialization of a vocational nature, not the formal professional environment we like to fancy ourselves as inhabiting.
In spite of this, we are often reminded by the apologists for certification that GIS is not a real profession unless it adopts a code of ethics and a competency document. According to D. Pugh, as cited by N. Obermeyer (1), GIS only has six of the required eight characteristics of a profession, with only the code and certificate needed to complete the set. This is simply not true; as we have seen, the vast majority of recognized professional careers require neither. It's not even clear if Pugh's comments are relevant at all; his remarks were designed to legitimize the activities of public administrators and have nothing to do with what we do.

Of course, GIS is a profession by definition, in the sense that practitioners get money for it. But this leaves out people who are really getting paid to do something else, planning, business, environment, government, etc. and who use GIS as a tool. Certification boosters cavalierly dismiss these folks as mere users, and demote them to some vague second class status, reserving the exalted certificate for those who do nothing but operate GIS software. It might just as easily be argued that those who are GIS specialists working in support of other disciplines are mere technicians and should not be considered true professionals either. And what about those who administer GIS and configure and maintain spatial data systems; that is, those who install software, manage databases, integrate hardware, write macrocode, i.e., the more IT aspects of the field? Aren't these the real GISers? This just might meet with some resistance from those who see GIS as only one of many technologies used to support cartography, photogrammetry, remote sensing, and other "core" geomatics disciplines. How can we certify GIS professionals when they can't even agree on who they are and what they need to know?
The one single fact everyone in the certification debate seems to agree on is that competency evaluation should concentrate on fundamental principles, not characteristics of individual software packages. But once you get past the specifics of user interfaces, there are no fundamental GIS principles! Only geographic concepts such as scale, projections and coordinate systems remain. Certainly, many geometric, topological, and database ideas are implicit in all GIS architectures, but there is no generic spatial syntax (analogous to the use of pseudocode or flowcharting in programming) which can be used as a basis for evaluation. You can't determine GIS expertise using verifiable standard criteria, it must always be in reference to familiarity with a specifc vendor's applications program.

The point I'm trying to make here is that GIS is not a profession in the sense we consider law, medicine, or surveying as such. It is software, technology, infrastructure, it is a way of automating the same things that we've always done, since long before there were computers, before there was any mechanization at all. Look at any current definition and you will see that those tasks currently denoted as GIS were once performed by analog techniques or even manually. These activities, the "collecting, managing, analyzing and displaying" of spatial data and its tabular attributes, didn't require certificates then and there's no reason they should suddenly require them now. The endless examples of bad geographic practice trotted out by the pro-certification lobby to back up their position were already poor geography a thousand years ago. You don't need to invoke GIS to explain them, and certifying its practitioners is not going to make them go away either. Bad GIS practices are actually bad geographic skills. Using the logic usually employed to justify the need for minimum standards for GISers, it would make a lot more sense to certify cartographers, instead. Or perhaps restrict the use of GIS only to university-degreed geographers---No? I didn't think you'd care much for that idea either...

Besides, why should it always be only those who actually do the work who have to go through the additional hurdle of certification? Why don't certification proposals ever include responsibility for the employer as well, as it does in other industries which accept institutional accreditation? The customer has a right to know that the firm or agency ultimately responsible for delivering GIS product is reliable and legal. Likewise, the GIS worker is entitled to a working environment operated in an ethical and competent manner; if anyone needs certification it is the GIS organization itself, not its individual staffers. There is no doubt that the typical GIS professional would be much more likely to accept the inconvenience and expense of acquiring certification if he or she knew that they were not being expected to carry the entire burden alone. At the very least, it would be reassuring to know that management is ready to assume the same obligations and responsibilities it is so eager to impose on its workers.

The true value and promise of GIS has arisen from the ingenuity and innovation of it's practitioners and the enterprises which have provided us with the applications and systems we use today. It is difficult to imagine how any form of institutionalized control or regulation could have produced this explosion of creativity. The thrill of being in this industry is that anyone can contribute and anyone can borrow these concepts for their work and bring their own perspective to it. Only the free market, the law and the review of our peers are needed for guidance, and only in the field of mutually acceptable technical standards should we feel the need for top-down intervention. The history and success of GIS over the past few years argues this point so convincingly that it is difficult to understand how this certification initiative ever arose in the first place.

The current push for GIS certification has little to do with professional practice, ethics, prestige of the discipline and its practioners, or any of the other noble and pious humbug we hear in the public debate right now. The true origins of this issue are political and economic; they are about salary structures, labor relations, contractual and bidding practices, inter-disciplinary turf wars, human resources policy, legal maneuver and academic posturing. These are not merely academic debates destined to be settled in the scholarly journals or the trade papers; for starters, consider the potential legal ramifications of GIS certification, with all the financial liabilities and responsibilities that it implies, which have never been properly addressed by its supporters. Where litigation and money are involved, can lawyers be far behind? These issues are inevitable and they must be addressed, perhaps some form of restrictive regulation may even be needed to codify them, but let us conduct that debate openly and honestly and in terms which are clear to everyone who has a stake in this industry. As Dr. Francis Harvey has pointed out,

"...the current GIS certification and licensing discussion is perhaps little more than an attempt to stake out professional turf. ... licensing and certification proponents’ calls for certification evidence strong political motivations. The control of a field through certification or legislation protects the economic interests of people who define and maintain the instruments of licensing and certification." (2)

Most of all, we must stop selling certification as a cure for the very real problems of inadequate salaries and lack of respect for lower-level GIS workers. On the contrary, regardless of how carefully we may think we are limiting the abuse of certification by technically challenged hiring bureaucracies, it is inevitable that employee competency documentation will be used to justify and entrench their Dickensian evaluation and selection policies. No amount of logic or reason will move these functionaries once they have access to such a weapon. The implementation of general GIS certification will turn over control of our livelihoods to Human Resources staffs and others whose primary raison d'etre is to keep worker compensation and empowerment as restricted as possible.

Far from providing an aid to GIS workers in the market for a job, or for an upgrading of the dignity of their position, certification will have precisely the opposite effect. If there is a shortage of jobs relative to labor, those without certificates will be effectively cut out of work and management will use the certificate only to ensure their technicians have a minimum skill level. It will work in the employer's favor and it is the certificate holders who will be paying their own testing and evaluation costs. On the other hand, if there is a shortage of workers relative to available positions, the uncertified may be hired, but at lower salaries because of their undocumented status. Even then, some of the certified will be told "...we have no openings right now for senior staff, but we do have positions available for junior techs...". This strategy is employed routinely today on college graduates, you can count on it being unleashed on the merely certified. Worst of all, the certificate may eventually evolve into a document that says, in essence, "the holder is skilled at routine technical detail work, but is probably unsuitable for a more creative management position." It will become the GIS equivalent of a chauffeur's licence. Please forgive my cynicism, but I've mapped this terrain before.

(1) http://www.urisa.org/GIS_CERT_PRES/sld008.htm
Obermeyer, Nancy J. 1993. “Certifying GIS Professionals: Challenges and Alternatives”. URISA Journal. Vol. 5 No. 1
Pugh, D.L. 1989. “Professionalism in Public Administration”, Public Administration Review. Vol. 49. Pp 1-8.
(2) http://www.urisa.org/Journal/accepted/articles_accepted_index.htm
Harvey, F. 2002. "The Significance of Public Safety for GIS Professional Licensing and Certification." URISA Journal, Vol. 14 No. 3, Pp 19-24.