If I had the time, or the inclination, I might look into this law and its origins. Who lobbied it through the legislature, who supported it and who are they beholden to? Who greased the skids for it, and would have their agenda furthered by passing it? That is, other than the obvious, another naked power grab by government determined to hamstring the free enterprise system and steal from honest businessmen, or some hippy-dippy consumerist group who does this sort of thing just out of spite, just to bring down the civilized world.

Here are the usual suspects:

1)Big corporate computer repair services, who know they can better afford to get this licence than the usual mom-and-geek shop, and this will help put their competition out of business.

2)Large corporations who have the potential of having their sensitive confidential files recovered when computers are serviced, or reconditioned after surplussing.

3)A cottage industry is gearing up somewhere to train techs and give them their certificates (for a fee, of course).

Maybe I'm just paranoid, but every time I hear about government being up to no good, I can't help but suspect that some private enterprise somewhere stands to benefit by it, and is actually the hidden motive force behind the action. This is not just an ideological issue for me, I was heavily committed to a losing battle against professional certification in my own industry, and it wasn't the government that was the enemy, it was private businesses that were gearing up for the lucrative market of issuing the certificates. I eventually lost the battle, but I became a spokesman against this scam, very similar to your Texas geek squad proposal, and fought the battle in the trade press, symposia, conferences, round tables and on the internet. I lost, but to this day, I still get emails or run into people at conferences who come up to me and shake my hand because I fought against this.

Here is an essay I wrote for one of the trade papers on this topic, you may notice that the issues here are very similar to the Texas case. And government was NOT the villain. I know what I'm talking about, I was at war with these people for over five years. I know this is a lot of crap I'm asking you to plow through here, but please humor me, it is relevant to the issue we're discussing, and touches on a lot of other arguments we have here on the Zone and it is most certainly on-topic. Sorry about the formatting, viewing it full screen helps clean it up.

A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON GIS CERTIFICATION

For the last few years, the GIS literature has contained numerous references to the need for job certification for individuals in the field.
Justifications for this position are numerous and well thought out, and the concept can't be summarily dismissed. On the other hand, the
entire issue is an ethical minefield strewn with potential problems and contradictions, and it isn't immediately obvious that the profession
should pursue this course. The following article was assembled to review some of these issues and to form a rough outline for the argument
that GIS certification is, at the very least, problematic. I have attempted to systematically list and categorize my own reservations, and it's my
hope that these comments will provide a counter to the generally positive assessments in the debate.

Professional Issues
The incredible success and accomplishments of GIS technology have been achieved precisely because it has been able to borrow
techniques and talent from a variety of widely separate scientific and engineering fields. This process has been effective without any form of
certification or credentials. In fact, many GIS innovators and leaders don't even have college degrees or have received academic training in
nongeographic disciplines. So why do we need certification now? What purpose would it serve?

GIS is a technical tool useful to a variety of disciplines. It's not self-evident that it requires the legitimizing stamp of a certificate, or even of an
academic degree. Even if we concede that there are good reasons to have some sort of competency documentation program, who should be
in a position to determine how it will be organized? GIS technology is so widespread in so many technical areas that this isn't immediately
apparent. It's for this reason that computer programmers have successfully resisted attempts at certification for so long. It should also apply to
GIS-for the same reasons, and with the same happy results.

Certification and certification organization accreditation will create a lucrative, but unproductive, bureaucracy and provide it with immunity from
criticism because of its life-and-death power over others' careers and its perceived value to the private sector. This institution will only add to
the existing hierarchy of professional organizations, lobbyists, publishers, journalists, academics, consultants, analysts, and other camp
followers and carpetbaggers who follow the real pioneers into the wilderness.

There's already too much credentialism in our society, even if one concedes that some is probably necessary. It's my conviction that the
universally understood (but unstated) purpose of certification is either the protection of established careers or the control and manipulation of
the industrial workforce-or both. Even those who sincerely disagree with this position must recognize that this is how many of their colleagues
perceive it.

The Marketplace
In a market economy, skilled employees are a resource like any other, and they should be paid in the same coin. The training and
maintenance of staff, as well as the costs of acquiring and evaluating them, is a legitimate business expense, and prices should be
determined by market forces. Workers are free to invest in their own market value by purchasing their own education and training to whatever
level they feel is appropriate. The imposition through legislation or professional edict of certification requirements violates this principle and
isn't to be tolerated.

Forced job certification obliges practitioners in the field, regardless of education or experience, to undergo an additional and unnecessary
hurdle to employment. It provides unskilled labor the opportunity to bypass the complex and expensive educational process and a long
industrial apprenticeship. The result will be that both the expert and the tyro will be competing for the same jobs, and it won't be for top
wages. This will not benefit the GIS worker, the profession, the consumer or, in the long run, the industry itself.

By using certification as a means of vetting job candidates, employers will spare themselves the risk and expense of evaluating and testing
new staff. Although this isn't necessarily a bad thing, that expense shouldn't be borne by the candidates themselves-or the taxpayer. It should
be paid for by the employer who requires and profits from it. The fact that perfectly qualified, but uncertified, candidates will suffer from this
arrangement means little to the employer. Undoubtedly, the uncertified might still be hired, but at lower salaries. Well-meaning proponents of
certification are quick to point out that the document should never be used to discriminate against any prospective workers, but it's inevitable
that industry will eagerly seize upon this mechanism to cull their applicants. Can government-required registration and licensing be far
behind?

GIS specialists who feel that a certificate will give them an edge over others in the competition for jobs should keep in mind that this head
start is illusory and can be a double-edged sword. This approach will provide the employer an unfair advantage in the natural and wholesome
competition between labor and management. Moreover, in the event certification becomes widespread, the value of the certificate must
erode. Diploma mills will flood the field with dubious documents, and the journeyman will be forced to re-certify periodically until a national
certification standard is adopted. Responsible purveyors of GIS certificates then will be forced into the same position as their customers when
a universally accepted (or imposed) accreditation program is implemented.

The demands of the private sector for job candidates with the skills required to immediately operate idle software isn't likely to encourage
certification programs that stress fundamental principles. The qualifications gained in these programs are most likely to be precisely those
with a short shelf life and little lasting value. Without a long-term interest in the development of the discipline or the welfare of the practitioner,
industry will be more likely to require competence in petty and volatile skills in current demand than in providing the worker a thorough and
well-rounded background. The result will be that certification will be necessary to secure employment, but will simultaneously provide little in
the way of job security.

Academia's Role
The purpose of the university is to preserve and advance human knowledge, not provide the private sector with job training facilities. This is
the legitimate role of government occupational instruction, labor organizations, professional societies, vocational schools, junior colleges, on-the-
job training, military tech schools, apprenticeship programs, etc. It's inevitable that universities and other institutions of higher learning will
be attracted by the lure of private funds to the certification business. Industry shouldn't have unrestricted and uncontrolled access to the vast
reservoir of public funding that the university represents. Even in the most independent private schools, the primary revenue sources are
government grants, tax breaks, loans, etc. Buildings, equipment and staff salaries are provided, at least in part, by the state. My tax dollars
shouldn't be subsidizing your boss's training budget.

With academia lending its prestige to industry-funded job training, the technical curriculum designed for commercial purposes will be provided
with a legitimacy it doesn't deserve. This can only erode the value of traditional academic degree programs while artificially inflating the
market value of private certification schemes. The right of the university to determine the curriculum in any discipline shouldn't be
compromised by the certifier's eagerness to accommodate private industry's current skill requirements and desires.

Graduate students must never become cheap hostage labor and be forced to toil on revenue-generating programs which primarily benefit
private firms and university corporate outreach schemes. This is inevitable if the universities get in the certification business, especially if
those students are on the public payroll. Such an approach exploits the student, and it represents unfair competition to legitimate business
enterprises engaged in providing technical training services.

Incentives for Innovation
GIS is a technical tool that can support many forms of human endeavor; it's comparable to the use of data processing techniques in society in
general. By professionalizing GIS, we will discourage the innovation brought to the field by talented GIS users with deep understanding of
other disciplines. Consider how data processing applications would have suffered if we had early on segregated programmers into a
credentialed priesthood, isolated from the application areas that have transformed our society. It can be argued that certain aspects of GIS,
as in data processing in general, may require narrow training, professional societies, journals, college departments and the rest of the
paraphernalia associated with specialization. Perhaps such tasks as the design of clever spatial algorithms or database architectures might
justify a specialist corps of narrowly trained GIS "scientists," but not its application as a research tool or business technology.

In addition, would it be reasonable to expect talented individuals in such diverse fields as archaeology, epidemiology, geophysics, botany,
zoogeography, etc., to have bothered to accumulate the technical knowledge needed to support their applications if they had been forced to
employ professional GIS people to carry on this activity; or if they had been discouraged from mastering the GIS arts by arbitrary paper
barriers? By way of analogy, recall that Louis Pasteur was a chemist, not a physician. Closer to home, consider that most early research on
image processing was done by electronics engineers, not by remote sensing certificate holders. It would be tragic if talented GIS users were
persuaded to abandon the field; or worse, be forced into management, because advancing their careers was contingent on the administrative
requirement of getting yet another sheepskin.

The explosion of GIS use among nontechnical fields such as business and planning may be threatened if potential users are limited in how far
they can continue without having to spend the time and money to legitimize their work with a certificate course or examination. Apologists for
the documentation position may counter that the professional certificate wouldn't apply to the casual user in science, engineering or
commerce. But the reality remains that few are likely to invest a great deal of effort in mastering a skill they can't add to their resume as a
potential job asset unless they take the additional ceremonial step of acquiring a certifying document.

The widespread diversity in professional backgrounds among GIS users suggests that the practical difficulties of forging a certification
program fair to all of them may already be insurmountable. We can already see the political battlelines being drawn within GIS, as well as in
related disciplines such as surveying. This isn't an environment friendly to creative thinkers.

A Personal View
I've worked 28 years in the geotechnology field. My academic training was in astronomy and mathematics, my graduate degree in geography.
I've worked in navigation, astrometry, photogrammetry, automated cartography, computer graphics, image processing, remote sensing and
GIS. I've been employed by the military, mom-and-pop shops, Silicon Valley laboratories, industrial giants, universities and government
agencies in positions in data acquisition, production, research and management. Although I welcome the opportunity to add to my credentials
by acquiring professional certification (I have ASPRS certificates in GIS and remote sensing), I will not tolerate the requirement that one must
pursue these documents to continue his or her career. Although it's unlikely that the push for certification will ever affect me personally
(management always seems to find a way to avoid the unpleasantries it seeks to impose on others), geography has provided me with a
lifetime of interesting and useful work, and I owe a debt to it and to those who helped me along the way. I can't honor this debt directly, so I
choose instead to repay those who will follow me. I feel there's little I can do to recognize that obligation more important than to persuade my
colleagues not to pursue a policy of forced professional certification.