I listened in on an ebizQ webinar today, The Path to SOA Enlightenment, and some interesting points came up about SOA education. The sponsor of the webinar was the Integration Consortium, which of course has a vested interest in encouraging SOA education since they already offer training and certification, but there’s few who would disagree that we need better education about a number of integration-related areas. Here’s a few screen snaps of the audience survey responses gathered during the webinar:
The first of these allowed the audience to select more than one response, while the second only allowed the selection of a single reponse. The two above make sense together: if people think that it’s the integration specialists and architects who most need certification, then it follows that the biggest area of training would be concepts rather than technologies.
The next one, which also allowed more than one response to be selected, shows the topics that people feel are important in the training, and there’s a few surprises here, such as organization, policies and governance in first place with 88% of the vote. SOA design and standards almost tied for second with 75% and 73%.
The audience also responded that although only 34% of them have an integration or SOA methdology in place, 87% are interested in having one.
Sandy,
Thanks for the post, but I would like to correct one important point. The IC does not offer training and certification. The education committee is newly formed. At the Global Integraton Summitt in May in Boston we will being the process of defining certification requirements and what to contribute to the I-BOK. Training however, is not part of the IC education committee’s mission statement and we do not expect the IC to offer training programs.
Beth Gold-Bernstein
Beth, sorry for the misunderstanding about the timing for IC and certification: the education committee (which you chair) has stated an objective to create a certification program, but it’s not yet created.
Given that IC is behind the Global Integration Summit where several training tutorials are offered, however, I believe puts it in the category of educator as well.