[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Final call: ROS Summer Course 2018 - Online & Certificate

[Steve Macenski via Discourse.ros.org]

I think we might be going in a different direction than I intended. It's not that I think its important there's some generalized set of things someone must learn to qualify for a given "certification level", its the fact that the curriculum seems to not have been created with informed opinions from industry about elements that should be included to represent a real hiring advantage by having the certification you are trying to provide. If this was branded as just a course to learn ROS that's one thing, but that's not how the webpages read. 

When you make claims like "job ready" without actually talking to folks that are hiring roboticists/ROS users, it seems like false advertising and some mis-information for non-robotics folks/graduate students - potentially leading to false expectations of their skill level leaving or the marketability of a certification. A certification won't mean much (or anything) to anyone hiring roboticists if they didn't have a say in what was covered *or* even knowing a list of things this certification would let me expect them to know. Udacity can do what they do because the coursework is widely available and I can see what it is someone with a nano-degree is expected to know and generally the skillsets taught in a course like that are reasonably in-depth (as far as you can in a few months) for the ~800 price tag. 

I don't think any organization - except by a larger decree from OR or similar status organization - should define what it means to be certified in ROS or the surrounding ecosystem. However if you made aware what your certification does, and it actually represents a significant volume of knowledge beyond that of a graduate student's messing around with research for a few years, that could represent value to hiring folks. But that's still not really enough to claim "job ready", I think that claim requires some type of partnership or extensive polling of robotics companies to make this certification carry weight to be a meaningful influencer in hiring cycles.

tl;dr  this seems to be a more extended version of what @vmayoral mentioned, with an additional dive into the "job ready" claim that I take issue with.





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