BSD Professional Job Task Analysis Survey

The first step in getting the BSD Professional exam underway is the Job Task Analysis (JTA) Survey. What is a JTA? It's an online survey where you can help define what skills are important for a BSD systems administrator at the "Professional" level.

The survey presents a collection of tasks organized into Knowledge Domains. Each task includes two rankings- one for Importance and the other for Frequency. These rankings are used in Psychometric Analysis to identify the key skills that should be tested on the exam.

The survey takes about 20 minutes to complete and contains several opportunities for you to express your thoughts on the selection or description of tasks for each Knowledge Domain. Your comments are very important, as they help form the direction and style of the exam.

The survey will be provided in other languages besides English as soon as our translation teams get finished. We hope to have the survey available for 30 days in each language.

As soon as the survey is complete, we'll start compiling the results.

One of the questions asked is about whether the BSD Professional exam should be just a multiple choice exam, just a hands-on lab, or both. We are very interested in your opinion on this issue. There are those who say certifications are useless. But if you can really assess skills, like you can with a hands-on lab exam, this makes the certification verifiable, and provides real value to potential employers.

Let us know what you think. Give the BSDP JTA Survey a go and express yourself.