Task Analysis Survey Report from the BSD Certification Group

[Jeremy C. Reed]

Below is a press release from the BSD Certification Group about their Task 
Analysis Survey Report. We made sure that "DragonFly BSD" was correctly 
capitalized and had a space, but sorry I overlooked the graphics. It 
reports that 3.8 percent of the survey takers say that DragonFly was in 
use at their school or employment.

July 20, 2005 -- The BSD Certification Group announced today that
the report of the results of their recent Task Analysis Survey is
publicly available. The survey was initiated in late April and
was offered in several languages. Approximately 60 countries had
at least one responder and 637 people participated in the survey.
The report covers the purpose and methodology of the survey and
includes evaluations of over 200 system administration tasks,
proposed testing methods, and certification types and levels.
The BSD Certification Group intends to use the report to develop
a certification roadmap, including a curriculum, test methods, and
timetable.
"The report and analysis will drive the curriculum development
efforts," said Jim Brown, BSD Certification Group member. "We now
have a good idea of which system administration tasks are important
to members of the BSD community."
"We also have a good feel for how varied the community is in age
and experience," said Brown. "These three factors give us quite a
bit of room to work in developing the curriculum."
Another one of the goals of this survey is to ensure that the
upcoming certification is an accurate, up-to-date and valid
measurement of the skills needed by BSD system administrators, said
Jeremy C. Reed, member of the BSD Certification Group.
"There were a lot of comments.  It was refreshing to read so many
different points of view," said Brown.  "The community members
really had a lot to say on certifications in general and BSD
certification in particular."
"One thing that impressed me was the desire for BSD certification
to stand out," said Brown.
"They want the certification to be a significant achievement, and
have it highly regarded in the industry," Brown said. "Along with
that was a desire to see the certification be accessible worldwide."
In order to reduce the size of this comprehensive report, Section
5 of the report contains hyperlinks pointing to separate PDFs of
the graphs so readers with limited bandwidth can just download
graphs of interest.  The report itself is 143 pages and is available
as a 2.8 MB PDF. Each hyperlink in Section 5 contains the size of
the associated PDF.
The report is available for download at 
http://www.bsdcertification.org/downloads/sr1_links.pdf.

About the BSD Certification Group

The BSD Certification Group is comprised of educators, writers and
sysadmins who are well versed in and passionate about BSD systems.
The group was formed in January 2005 to create a BSD certification
program that is recognized as the industry standard for certifying
both the knowledge and the ability to perform administrative tasks
on BSD systems. The BSD Certification Group website is at
http://www.bsdcertification.org/.