Spoiler alert: here at LM one of my favorite final interview questions for potential employees is to ask about a new body of knowledge, skill or expertise they’ve gone about learning in the past 12 months. You may be surprised that about 20% fail the question, and go on to fail the interview anyway. Typically, they admit they haven’t pursued new learning for reasons like working harder at their job, becoming great at Xbox or having been so busy they “haven’t had the time.” Sure, honesty is important, but very few character traits are more valuable to a startup tech company as the pursuit of learning. It is hard to find career success at a startup if you can’t push yourself to learn and contribute new and developing skills.
A couple years ago I sat at The Grove restaurant in San Francisco with my old friend and tech entrepreneur, Thor Muller, the co-Founder of RubyRed Labs and GetSatisfaction. We debated the existing firestorm in tech circles fired off by Peter Theil, who argued against value of formal education versus attained skills. You may recall the “don’t go to college, start a startup” phenomenon. Even years later the debate is actually not decided, but the world is indeed changing fast and consuming knowledge in new ways. For those of you, who like myself, still find great value in a college degree as a tattoo of stick-to-it-iveness as much as it is a likely corollary for smarts, you also probably won’t be surprised to see the Economist magazine finally seal the fate on the dwindling future of traditional universities. Massive Online Open courses – or MOOCs – are blazing the future of mainstream learning. Here at LM we are getting in on the action.
We still support and hire lots of engineers with their shiny new degrees but we also know that skills-based learning, as opposed to college textbooks, is how to become expert in IT performance monitoring! We’re proud to announce the launch of the LogicMonitor Certified Professional exam! [Note, the exam will actually be a LMOC as opposed to a MOOC].
The LogicMonitor Certified Professional (LMCP) exam is the first level of an eventual three-level certification program. The LMCP study guide and exam will test your knowledge of Linux and Windows, networks and databases, monitoring protocols, and of course – LogicMonitor administration. So why enroll in this LMOC?
1. Expedite the learning curve to expose advanced LM capabilities!
2. Establish yourself as one in a growing pool of experts to fuel our community. With the LMCP you can make our product and customer experience even better by sparking discussion, debate, sharing best practices and discovering new ways to deploy and extend LM.
3. Demonstrate your monitoring prowess. Certification is good for your business and your personal professional development. We’ll provide LMCPs with a LinkedIn badge and access to a special LinkedIn group.
LMCP registration is open and testing will commence in July 2015. Because we want LM knowledge available to all of you brave enough to test and strengthen your LM skills, we will promise to not contribute to the growing divide that exists for access to training and skills development in the US workforce. To show our support for all LM lovers out there, if your company won’t foot the bill for your Level 1 cert, we will!
Kevin McGibben is CEO at LogicMonitor