 Delighted to introduce our first speaker, a colleague of mine, Andrew Josie, Andrew is our Vice President of Standards and Certification at the Open Group. And Andrew oversees all the certification and testing programs of the Open Group and manages the standards process for the Open Group. Since he joined the company in 1996, Andrew has been closely abandoned to develop projects including the specifications and certification development for the ArchiMate, TOGAP, POSIX and the UNIX program. He's a member of IEEE, UserNIX, Floss UK and the Association of Enterprise Architects. And Andrew is going to talk to us today about TOGAP virtual certification and training. We will then have a 15-minute Q&A session with Andrew, so please get the questions coming. I think he's already ready to go from Oxford, I think, in the UK. So, Andrew, over to you. Have a good day, everyone. Thanks, Steve. Hello, from Oxford, so I think it's raining out the window at the moment. Let's just see if I can get these slides going, which is always the first challenge of the day. Okay, yes, here we go. And we'll just start by looking at today's agenda. I think Steve's covered most of this, but I'll be talking first about virtual certification and training. Some of the efforts that we've made there to obviously mitigate the current circumstances. And then we will be having a Q&A panel. In fact, I think I've got a few of my colleagues who may join me from the certification team on that. And then we'll take a break and then we'll have some members of the forum and also Sonia Gonzalez, who's our forum director. So we have the two co-chairs, Paul Holman, Mick Adams, and Sonia, who is our forum director, talking about what's happening in the forum. And then Chris Frost is going to tell us about one of the projects that's under the way, one of the initiatives, which is about the TOGA standard and Agile, so how EA can support Agile delivery and support the Agile enterprise. So let's get into my slides. We've done the welcome. And let me just turn my camera off to save on the bandwidth for now. So I'm going to be talking about three topics today. I'll talk about TOGA training, TOGA certification, and then I'll also talk about open badges. Before we do, just a quick reminder about what the open group is. The open group is a global consortium that enables the achievement of business objects through technology standards. We have a vision of boundaryless information flow achieved through global interoperability in a secure, reliable, and timely manner. We have 750 member organizations that are headquartered in 46 countries. We have staff and local partners in 12 countries, so the open group is global. The open group training and certification programs are based on the standards produced by our members. So you see on this diagram here the flow from our members working together in forums and work groups to produce standards, which then lead to certification and training programs. The standards are developed and reviewed by acknowledged leaders in their fields, ensuring that the certifications we produce are based on industry, accepted best practices and expertise. Let's now jump into the first of the three topics that I wanted to talk about today, and we'll look at TOGAF training. The open group has 68 training organizations worldwide that offer accredited training. What do we mean by accredited training? Well, that's where the open group assesses each course to ensure it meets the quality standards to become an official training course from the open group. And so for at the current moment, there are 69 accredited TOGAF training courses. Our accredited training is delivered in 15 languages, which include English, French, Czech, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Finnish and Swedish. Interesting that I looked those all up. And they are delivered in a number of delivery formats. So they can be delivered in classroom. They can be remote classrooms for virtual sessions, e-learning, and also there is blended delivery that's allowed. Some trainers may prefer to do a mixture of those three delivery methods. One thing we've done with the current circumstances is to make sure that all of the open group accredited training course providers are able to deliver their courses as virtual instructor-led courses. And we've made that easy to find. If you go to the open group website, you click on the certifications tab. You can easily click on our virtual resources page, and then that will lead you off to a couple of additional pages. This one shows the calendar that we're running at the moment to make it easy to find a virtual classroom course. And this one actually shows where you can get an e-learning course. Not all of our providers provide e-learning, some of them do. Stepping now into certification, as Steve mentioned, we're very proud of the TOCA standard. Many of the open group standards have become industry standards. So we look at POSIX, UNIX. We see things like the FACE consortium and its avionics standards. We like to think as TOGAF is the... TOGAF standard is the DEFACTO EA standard. And we see it widely referenced in recruitment and the open group architecture certifications regularly feature in the top paid IT skill list, such as the foot report. But it's definitely... they are certifications that are recognized in the industry and worth having. What is TOGAF certification? Well, it's a globally recognized and portable credential. So it's not tied to one specific vendor or knowledge of one specific technology. It's vendor neutral. It allows you to demonstrate your commitment to the EA discipline to your employers and to your peers. To show that, yes, I know about EA. I know I am committed to the discipline of being an enterprise architect through your TOGAF certification. It's market driven, so that means we've actually got education, training and certification that backs behind the standard. So the information to skill up is easily and readily available. Today we have a portfolio of TOGAF certification. So it's no longer just TOGAF certification. We have the actual foundation and certified levels. And then we have a few other certifications behind that. And I'll talk about those in the next few slides. But before we dive into the new areas, I will first focus on the two levels that most of you hopefully are familiar with. That's the TOGAF foundation certification and TOGAF 9 certified. These are often referred to as Level 1 for foundation and Level 2 for certified. TOGAF 9 foundation is about obtaining a basic understanding of the TOGAF 9 standard. And that's suitable really for anybody who's working in a role associated with an architecture project. And it's the first introduction to the TOGAF standard. So if you've never come across it before, this is a good place to start. And you can also use this as a step on stepwise learning, as we'll see in the next slide. TOGAF certified is really for individuals requiring a deeper understanding of the standard. So it's being able to analyze and apply the standard. And this is really professional, aimed at professionals working in an organization where the TOGAF standard has been adopted. And those professionals who are participating in architecture projects and initiatives. So it's really, you know, it's also aimed at architects who are responsible for developing architecture artifacts and also for architects who are looking to introduce TOGAF into an architecture practice. As I mentioned on that slide, it is possible to do stepwise development. And this slide shows the path to certification. So you have a choice really, whether you wish to do a step at a time, in which case you can take a single-part exam. So you can take part one exam, get the foundation, and then take the part two exam. Or you can actually take what we call the combined part one and two exam, where the two exams are actually put together. And you can go straight to the higher level, the TOGAF 9 certified level. If we look at the content here, this is the foundation level. The TOGAF 9 foundation level includes 13 learning units. Learning units are typically sort of 30-minute chunks. And here we see it's a sort of high-level concept, basic concepts, course concepts, introduction to various areas of the standard. To go to the higher level, in addition to the foundation, you have to do an additional 27 learning units, which makes a total of 40 learning units altogether. So you're getting a lot more in depth here. And what we see a typical course will typically be about four days to cover both levels. The certifications are supplemented by what we call open badges. And I'll talk about open badges in more detail a little bit at the end of this session today. The first one I'm going to talk about today is the badge for the TOGAF standard version 9.2. Since TOGAF 9 certification has been active since 2009, we needed a way to show that an individual has up-to-date knowledge of the 9.2 release. So this is why we've introduced this badge to show that. There are two paths to earn this badge. The first path is you've actually... I mean, one of the paths is that you've taken an accredited 9.2 course and then you will get this badge issued with your certification badge. The other path I will show on this slide is actually if you've taken your qualification before the 9.2 release was available. So this is the path for individuals who had taken their TOGAF 9 certification before 9.2 and it's basically a very short course which introduces the changes between 9.1 and 9.2 and then you can get this badge will be issued to you and once you earn this badge you will also be awarded the 9.2 badge. One of the new badges we have available is TOGAF Business Architecture Level 1. This is typically a two-day course and it focuses on business modelling and developing a business architecture based on the TOGAF standard version 9.2. We currently have nine accredited courses and we have a study guide available for this. So this is about looking at business architecture concepts such as developing business models, business model canvas, business capabilities, business scenarios, information mapping, value streams, how you apply all that in the development of a business architecture based on the 9.2 standard. Another new credential we have is around risk and security and this focuses on applying risk and security with the TOGAF standard. So that's quite new. We don't have much uptake on that one at the moment but that's a brand new one that we've just recently introduced. Obviously it would be remiss not to mention the other certifications that the Open Group has and we've covered all of you. Those of you who have been attending the last two days will have heard of some of these technologies. We have certification for the IT for IT reference architecture. We have a new certification program for the digital practitioner body of knowledge. That's active, again, like all the other programs. We have study guides for that just freshly printed. We also have an Arcumate certification program. That has been recently updated to 3.1, version 3.1 of the Arcumate specification. Again, we've refreshed all of our training and studying materials around there. Lastly, in the risk and security area, we have the Open Fair certification which ties in a way to the risk and security credential that I showed on the previous slide. Enabling each of these certifications are exams. Obviously with knowledge based certification, we like to make sure that we have a fair and equitable measure of knowledge and we do that through exams. We typically have simple multiple choice exams covering the level one topic areas. Then we have what we call scenario based questions which are a little bit in depth where you have to do a bit more analysis and application to answer the questions. Most of our exams are now available for remote delivery over the internet. You can go to this link here. Again, a pull down from our certifications tab at the Open Group will take you to the online Procted Exams information page. We actually use a solution called OnView from Pearson View. This is actually quite interesting. It uses AI technology to allow you to self-check in using a smartphone. If you're interested on this, there is a YouTube video where you can find out more information. If you are considering taking your exam at home, there's a system test where you can check the suitability of your device and also your internet connection. I've heard some stories. Obviously, with the lockdown, it's not necessarily suitable if you're in a noisy environment. You've got lots of kids running around to run into the room when you're taking your exam. It may not be suitable for everybody, but what we're seeing is quite an increased uptake compared to where we were before now. So that's good. Now I'd like to finish this section on certification by taking a look at the status of TOGA certification worldwide. As Steve mentioned, the headline numbers here were just under 100,000 TOGA certifications. I was trying to think of some analogies about large crowds. That may not be what we should be thinking about at this time of the day, but I did come up with a few analogies. For example, this is about the capacity of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, apparently. Also a bit more than the capacity of the Wembley Stadium in the UK, and I think perhaps I wasn't too good on US football stadiums, but I believe the Ohio Stadium, doing a Wikipedia lookup, has about 100,000 capacity as well. So it's a large body of people. And here you can see the split between foundation and certified. Some people prefer to do just straight to certified. Other people have taken the step-wise development. If we look worldwide, we're now seeing certification in 149 countries. We've actually seen steady growth in the number of countries over the years. I was looking this up. Seven years ago, we were having certifications in 62 countries. Five years ago, 122. And two years ago, when 9.2 was introduced, we were in 137 countries. I think we're starting to run out of countries where we can have more certifications. Now, this is a bit of an eye test. Now, the good news is the next few slides, I do zoom in. So if we take a look here, if we take you on a world tour and look at some of the stats here, we can see that six of the top 10 countries are in the Northern Hemisphere, including UK, USA, the Netherlands, France, Canada, and Germany. If we look in North America, obviously, besides the US, which is at 13,000, I should say the US and the UK are quite close, both in the 13,000s. We see Canada there at 3,800. We've also got Mexico, which actually comes in at number 23 in the world. If we move down, let's just move down in our world tour here. If we look at Central America, I've actually added a number there for the number one country in Central America and the number one country being Costa Rica. That's actually followed by Panama, which I don't have on this map, which has 23. If we do a quick tour around South America, we can see a top three of Columbia, Brazil, and Peru. If we move over to Africa and we take a look at the rest of the world, we can see in Africa, we have the top three of South Africa, which is actually number 10 in the world, Egypt, and followed by Nigeria. In the Middle East, we see the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. They're actually 18 and 21 in the world, so they're quite high too. If we move over to Asia, we see India in a dark color there. That's actually number three in the world, and I'll show some of the actual trends on the next slide to show how well India is doing. India with over 11,000 certifications followed next in Asia by China, Japan, and Singapore. Japan and Singapore are actually quite close in the 1300s, actually, within six of each other. I think they're jostling for position. In Oceania, we see Australia number six in the world with over 5,000, and not to forget New Zealand, which is right over at the far edge there. They've actually got 750 in New Zealand. If we look at the last 12 months' growth, if we look at these trends, we can actually see that India has been the number one growth country in the last 12 months, followed by the UK, USA, and France. So a lot of take-up in India. We like to think that the India initiative has a lot to do with that. Some of you will hopefully have heard about my colleague, Pella, Dr. Sahar, talking about India the other day. Lastly, I'd like to finish today by looking at open badges. These are a way to provide digital versions of the open group certifications, and not just certifications, we're also using it for contribution, awards, and achievements. So it's a way to recognise a number of things that are going on in the open group and with the open group members. We've partnered with Creadly, a company called Creadly, using their acclaimed platform. And as with all things digital, it's one thing we've heard over the past few days, that open badges actually enable more value than just a certificate. So there's a bit more to it than just a certificate. When you earn a certification now, it's very easy to communicate that with an open badge, to communicate that to your peers and to your professional colleagues. Similarly, when you are ready to make your next career move, as I know we see a lot in the industry, open badges actually allow you to more easily communicate your certifications and achievements to prospective employers. The open group has a profile of the claim, and within that there is actually a directory where you can search for individuals both by a number of criteria, by badges, skills, names, and also by location. Now this is for people who choose to make their profile and their information within the acclaimed system public. Obviously if you don't want your information to be searchable, then you should make sure that you set your profile as private. We have 83 badges right now, and we've issued over 41,000 individual badges to certified individuals. To illustrate some of the facilities with open badges, I wanted to actually take a look at my acclaimed profile and show you some of the things that I can do with it. So this is me. I've even put my photo up there. You can see here that I have 11 badges, and if you notice, there are actually some different shapes, and those are actually three different types of badges. So if you look here at the top one on the top left, that's a certification badge. I think that's my TOGOV9 certified. The next one in on that is actually what we call the certification credential. The difference between that and a full certification is usually the credentials are smaller chunks, chunks of learning. So it's typically something like a refresher course. And then we also see some green badges on there that they're quite new, and they're actually what we call contribution awards. And I will talk, I will finish at the end of this talk by just telling you a little bit about those, because all members and in fact all individuals who contribute to the open group are eligible to make a claim for those. If we make a click into a badge, we can see in one click information about the badge, about the credential, what it took to earn. So if you say to an employer, you know, I've got, you know, here at the TOGOV standard version 9.2 badge, they can click, you can give them a link. They can go and click on that link and they can find out what that actually means. What was the criteria for earning the badge? And they can also, with a single click, they can verify that that badge is genuine. So you click on the verify link and it will go down and actually display in real time a sort of verification of some real-time metadata associated with the badge. So you can see that that badge was issued by the open group to me on the 26th of April, 2018. It was issued using a claim accepted by me on the 30th of April, 2019. So that was a bit slow, wasn't I? Accepting that one. If we click on skills, one thing we notice with the badges, they also have skills associated with them. This is a simple one here, just has the TOGOV skill associated with it. If we click on that, we can actually look at the job opportunities for that skill. So I would click on that and that takes you into what the claim, what the acclaimed system calls labor market insights. And here we can look at the job opportunities for the UK where I'm based. And this was pulled and this was me doing a search yesterday. Now this is pulled from live job postings around the world. Acclaim has sources data from more than 25,000 global job boards and corporate career sites. You can see yesterday there were 539 job openings in the United Kingdom that we're looking for the skill TOGOV. So senior enterprise architect was at the top of there. And I can see looking at the salary ranges. Yes, that will do nicely. It's an easy way for you to look at the opportunities or maybe to see what, with your skills, what sort of salary you should be looking for. Now, now I've got this new badge. I want to share that with my peers. So what do I do? And this is done by clicking on the share button. What we do with our open badges it's very easy to make sharing. What we find is that most people seem to share their badges to LinkedIn. That's the number one. The LinkedIn platform is the number one place for sharing. And Acclaim makes it very simple to share on LinkedIn. You can add using Acclaim. You can add it to your LinkedIn profile and you can also share it to your news feed. This is the information here that you will get presented on the screen. A simple form pops up. I think to add to your profile there's a few things you need to do copying some data but it tells you exactly what to copy and gives you a copy field to do it. So it makes it easy. And the other thing sharing to your news feed you can actually just put in a message or it usually has a default message in there. So it makes it very simple to add this to your profile and also to share it to your news feed. And here's actually a couple I've done recently or done over the past area to here on the left you can see my certification section of Acclaim where I've got my certifications and my credentials. And you can also see on the right there where I've actually announced a new badge on my news feed. This is actually a contribution award that I was issued recently and I'll read in the detail. That was for the third edition of the Archimate Foundation Study Guide. So we've updated that recently to support the 3.1 specification. I got the badge issued. I then went into Acclaim. I clicked the share and as I did the share I actually rewrote a little bit of a section a little bit of an advert just to let folks know what the award was for but also let folks know that the actual new version of the study guide is available. That actually brings me on to my sort of last topic that I wanted to cover and that was contribution awards. Now these are available to all participants within the open group. They're available for a number of different categories. So we have them available for authors, for authors, contributors, reviewers and translators of the open group standards, guides and case studies. We have a page here. You can go to www.opengroup.org slash contribution-awards. You can read about it. It's a very simple online process for making a claim. You basically click on a claims form. It'll require you to log in so you have to have an account with the open group. It gets your profile information when you log in. You can select the publication that you want to make a claim for. You can select the award type and then it just asks you to upload one page from the document where your name is. In the front of all eligible documents, we have either an authors page about the authors or we have an acknowledgements page which usually lists who the contributors were. So you just upload that. That goes off into a system and then automatically, typically we say within, I think six working days, but it's usually just the next working day when the team are available that that gets processed and you'll have a badge issued. Okay, so that really wraps up from what I wanted to cover today. To summarize, I've covered three topics. I covered the open group training. Just to emphasize, we're enabled for virtual and e-learning delivery. So business as usual, as best we can. Open group certification also fully enabled for remote delivery. So you can take your training remotely or by e-learning again remotely. You can take your exams remotely. And lastly, we're now backing that up with digital first approach to issuing certification awards and awards through our open badges program. Okay, so that finishes this session. I think we go into Q&A now. That's right, Andrew. Thank you for that tour of the TAGA and other related certifications from the April group. Thank you very much. And we've had some questions coming in. Before we go to those, you also had a poll running, didn't you? As to... We're interested in knowing why people are interested in participating today. We're very glad to have you, but it's always good to know what it is that draws you in. And for future events, we can maybe tailor the agenda to meet those needs. So you will see there is a polling channel. So please take the time to go in and answer the poll as best you can. Thank you very much. So... And a reminder, if you have questions for Andrew, please put them in the question and answer channel rather than the chat channel. So we'll... Well, we've had a few come in, Andrew. So... And a couple that I will actually hold for the panel later because they are more about what's going on with the standard itself rather than certification. But let's kick off with... Many of those I have polled feel that four days is too rushed for the TOGF certification course. And many of the concepts simply are not well understood in that time frame. Is there a plan to... Questions, is there a plan to move it to five days? But I guess more generically, is there a plan to extend that period? Okay. Well, in fact, one group doesn't mandate a time for training. I think that's more a sort of a marketplace decision. I think that's probably the sweet spot for the trainers and maybe that's something we should feedback that, you know, maybe more time needs to be spent to cover the topics in depth. One thing we are doing is introducing the certification credentials which some of them will address specializations. That may give more time. People to go off and say, right, I've done the main course. I would like to learn more about business architecture now. So therefore I would take the TOGF business architecture level one credential where you would drill down for two days into business modeling, business capabilities, value streams and the like. So that may be the way we go forward is to have more credentials, more specializations. We might even go role-based as well. There's a bunch of ideas as we move forward that we're thinking about that. So it's always very good to get feedback from the market from users of how they're finding the current delivery platforms. Thank you. So a question that just came in, it did actually come in in the chat channel, but I just happened to see it flashed up and caught my eye and it's an interesting one to have. I know that you spoke of it, but what is the initial certification to begin my TOGF journey? Well, I would recommend starting with TOGF Nine Foundation. That's where I would start. But you may also find out if you go to our accredited trainers, they may also, some of them, have an awareness sort of level training. So maybe pick up the pocket guide. If you want to study at home, pick up the pocket guide, have a glance through that first before you decide whether or not to pick up the training and certification. Typically, we would recommend TOGF Nine Foundation. Okay. And those materials are available online, aren't they? Yes. We have two places for our information. There's what we call the open group library. So if you go to the open group homepage, it's on the far right. And we also have the open group shop. Most things we give away for free or about a few things we do charge. Now, when we do charge, it's not a huge amount of money. I think it might be $15 if you are not eligible for a pocket guide. I think most of the pocket guides are free to members or to employees of members of the open group. But they may be $15 to non-employees of members. Things like the practice tests at the moment we're actually running. They're all free right through June the 30th. There's a number of things like practice tests and reference cards that we've made free through June the 30th because of the current conditions. We'd like to encourage people to at least get an introduction to the standards. That's right. It's a great opportunity right now. It really is. Okay. You mentioned that we may drill down into some of the specializations. The next question is around business architecture. So the business architecture badge states level one. Is there an intention to introduce further levels in the future? Yes. What we wanted to do with our business architecture was to make it clear it's not the be all and end all for business architecture. There's a lot more to it. We just started that journey. Our long-term plan would be to add a level two essentially maybe fully turn it into what we call one of our full certifications. That's something we're looking at. We have drafted a set of conformance requirements that would make it into level two. That would be probably more application of actually doing it rather than just knowing about it. So that's one thing we're looking at. Obviously, we'd like to extend it as well to make it wider as well as deeper. Right. Sticking with the same certification business architecture, can it be done as a standard learning exam with no foundation part one or certification part two? Yes, it can be. The Toga business architecture, you can take that completely independently. We didn't tie that to having any prerequisites certification. So you can take that one. On its own, as I mentioned, there is a study guide, which I wrote it, but actually with co-authors. Another advert, but yes, there is a study guide if you want the self-study. And we do have nine accredited courses. So you can go to the Toga accreditation course registers, all this information available from the certification tab on the www.opengroup.org site. And you can navigate your way down and find out who offers what courses. So there's a question coming. You mentioned that we have a new credential for telegraph and security. Are study materials available for that yet? Or rather, the question was your colleague, our colleague Chris Franklin answered the question saying in the Q&A channel, saying that study materials are available at this link. But that one isn't. Study materials aren't available. Are they going to introduce them? And if so, roughly what's been? Well, we don't have a dedicated study guide for that one yet. Obviously, there are guides on which it is based. So if you were to look down at the conformance requirements, it does call out a certain guide that you should read, supplement your Toga knowledge. I think it's, sadly, I know it's G152 because that's the type of knowledge I have. I know our documents by their document numbers, which I think is the guide to integrating risk and security in a Togaf enterprise architecture, I think is the title, something like that. But there is a guide that you can go and read and you can look at the conformance requirements and see where the knowledge. That's actually very new and that's assessed in a different way there. And so that's a bit of an experiment we're doing with our accredited trainer channel to see where accredited trainers would actually provide the assessment. So that's quite new. Really hasn't quite taken off yet. We'd be interested to hear if you're interested in that, if you're interested in study materials, let us know it might be something that we should, should actually do. Okay. Question here. I cannot find my recertification anymore at the open group website. How can I find it? Okay. I'm not sure which program that would be because most of the knowledge based programs do not have a requirement to recertify. That would be part of our Open Professions program. In which case, write to open professions, actually write to me is probably the simplest because I know my email address, which is a.josny at opengroup.org. So write to me if you need to chase up on your certification. I will know who to put you in touch with. All right. There you go from the horses mouth. Let's see. Do you automatically earn the badge that you spoke of just for the completing the exam? Okay. What happens with badges? Obviously we're very cognizant of privacy and GDPR and all those type of things. And so we don't just blast these things out to you. You have to actually opt into the program. So when you've completed your certification within, we say 10 working days, I think we do a badge run once a week. So what will happen? Your certification will go into our badging system. It will go into the badging program. So you have to opt in first before we can issue a badge. It's a simple. You'll get an email that says, this is from the opengroup. You've recently qualified for a badge and it explains what we're going to do because we will have to share your information about your certification with Credly for them to issue the badge. So we have to get your explicit permission to do that. We do a badge run once a week. You can email with a magic URL and you will click that will then trigger our system to know that you've opted in. And the next time that we sync the badges to a claim, you will get it. What's quite nice with a claim is once you've set up your account there, you can set the account to automatically accept them. So you don't have to keep going backwards and forwards and it lets you know when you've got a badge. Thank you. Next question is on Togeff business capability modeling. When will the course have level 2 tests? Okay. Actually if you do pick up our study materials and things, we do have a lot of exercises around that area which we would encourage you to complete. That is something we are looking at what I mentioned with the level 2. That's something we're having an ongoing discussion about within the architecture forum. The architecture forum has a certification standing committee who we work with. We have drafted a set of level 2 performance requirements. We're yet to take that step forward. They have to go through a review and approval process within the open group. That's something that's definitely on the cards. It's just a matter of we will have to find the time and the resources to actually make it happen. Typically when we do a new sort of roll out it might take us a quarter, three or four months to actually do it from when we get the sort of we decide go to actually do it. Depending on how we do it we might have to be to test exams, develop exams and so on. It's not something we can instantly just flip the switch on. It's something that takes a development period in order to develop something in QA as well to make sure it's good enough. Okay. Thank you. Different angle or perspective for this question. Have you got any feedback from hiring companies about certifications and their value value? No, I don't have. I don't know if any of any of our other team on the team have but no. But what we do find looking at things like labour market insights it's very easy to see with the skills and job postings that are calling for TOGAF certification and other open group certifications. That's the sort of feedback level that I see. We may not be detailed enough but that's what I see is the marketplace asking for these things. When we started 9 or 10 years ago we didn't have that so now we're widely placed. Yeah, that's right. It's very common to see either as a requirement or a preference to have TOGAF certification for enterprise architecture job. Okay, talking of jobs and careers I'm a certified TOGAF architect. I would like to understand the path for master certified solution architect and its other prerequisites. Can you speak to that please? I'm not the world's expert on open professions but I don't know if anybody else I don't know whether anybody else doesn't come on voice from the team from Chris. Chris Franklin perhaps wants to open that one but basically we do have the open professions program and within that there are certain disciplines and probably master certified solutions architect is one of those. My high level understanding is that there you would have to submit what we call an experience profile basically a package detailing your skills and your experience so it's not knowledge based, it's not about what you know but it's about how the skills you have technical skills and soft skills and then the experience where you're able to demonstrate projects and then you go up against basically a review panel so you go up against your peers who will decide whether or not you've met the criteria the criteria are documented so look when you go to again the certifications tab of www.opengroup.org look for what we call our skills and experience based certifications and that's the path you would take there so you will need a certain number of years experience before you can go down that path but that is the logical way to go after you've got your TOGF certification is to start using your skills and experience one thing we are doing as we go forward with that program is breaking that program down into what we call milestone badges so as I talked about open badges there you will see a new set of badges appearing in the open group badges site which actually just breaks that down so it just means that when you prepare a package to apply for that you can actually do it in a much smaller chunk so there's like a you've got your communications badge and then I can't remember there's a few different badges but it just makes it a little bit easier so you can get some feedback as you go along and then when you've got your five badges you can get the certification that's right sort of milestones along the way isn't it it's a much easier process than it used to be so okay yeah folks want to know more about that again drop me an email and I will put people in touch with the right people yeah I've just added a link in the Q&A to actually take people straight to the open CA pages if they want to get the details of that as well thanks Chris I knew Chris knew where it was and our colleague Corrine has been answering some questions around do we have certifications for digital transformation she's referred people to the DP book standard and the study materials for that as well so I won't trouble you with that one but that question has been answered if you were the person asking it Corrine has been there and answered that here's an interesting one what's the additional value gained from a TOGF certification if you're already certified as an open group master IT architect that's a good question I think it depends what your when you did your certification as a master IT architect artifact architect it depends what method you referenced and maybe you will see job postings that specifically call out TOGF certification that might be the other other thing so it really depends what we are looking at is perhaps adding maybe one day adding the skills and experience badges directly into the TOGF certification program and making a level 3 no promises this is not a commitment to a forward looking statement but that's the sort of thing we are looking at to cross fertilize between the approaches we're taking and we can do it much easier by splitting things up into badges as well now I would say the real difference is that with the open professions program and the open CA component within the open professions program what you'll find is actually the key behind that is actually what we're looking for is experience within your particular field and it's designed to actually be nonspecific to any methodology so it doesn't refer to TOGF in particular however if you have TOGF experience you can use that whereas being TOGF certified is actually round showing that you have the knowledge of TOGF specifically as a standard so to summarize that TOGF certification shows that you understand TOGF being an open CA certified architect shows that actually you know how to apply TOGF or any other sort of architecture methodology right thanks Chris and the other point that Andrew made is sometimes the job requirements are such that you need TOGF which you didn't need for that certification so that's a good point again there's a lot of the questions coming in Corinne's doing a great job on answering let me find one that she hasn't got to yet I did see one question I wasn't sure we've answered was I haven't got my badge for my certification how do I get it which is a good question and you can email badgesadopengroup.org ideally you should give us a certificate ID if you've got the ID on your certificate that would be very helpful just makes it quicker for us to track you down that's all badgesadopengroup.org is the email address to send to that will raise a ticket in our help desk and we will be able to get on and get that out to you okay well let's see we had there's a question I saw come in about where is the best place to learn ArchiMate well obviously we would recommend one of our accredited training courses we tend to not recommend any specific course over any other but we recommend you go to our register of accredited courses and maybe look at the calendars that we've got available as well as well as the calendars I showed we're actually producing a new training calendar which is actually a bit more searchable a bit more busy weekend stuff and you can look up on there maybe you can find a course that's near to you and in the Q&A link some of our colleagues Corinne and Sonia have been giving specific links to where you can find those course details and the calendars so that's being answered in there when will Agile Architecture Framework certification be available yep that's a good question I think Steve's right we don't know yet for those who are following that work there are it's got to go through a couple of stages in standardization first the actual standard itself before we before we get round for that we did do some preliminary work on performance requirements but they're not they're not close to being final at the moment there's a document which I think is what they call their security playbook which is out for review and I know there will be a second round of review on the actual what they call the OAAF standard Open Agile Architecture Framework the Open Group Open Agile Architecture Framework that's it so we expect that to probably finish company review with a tailwind probably around July I should expect and then we can see where we get with certification development and things that's not currently got a release date right okay and we're running out of time but there's a question it says could you share the email I think that probably means your email which you did offer to out to people for putting them in touch with the right people yep A.JOSEY at opengroup.org initial.surname I may not know the answers but I'll put you in touch with the people who do right right and there's a question there is a question about what's the difference between Tegaf and Archimate and I think we'll hold that because I think that will come out in the later session today so hold that thought so I'm going to end with this one and apologies to anyone who I haven't got to but it's just flipped with somebody else coming in here we go I am ahead of enterprise architecture with 20 years plus experience I studied Tegaf 9 in 2012 and have been applying it in multiple organizations at multiple levels but I failed the book exam at the time what's the most expedient route to certification well it depends whether you feel you've got the you know whether you need the benefits of of attending a course or whether you're happy with self-study so there's a choice there isn't there really our trainers are offering both virtual remote training and also I know there are e-learning courses available and there are study guides so there's at least three choices yeah and although I said that was the last one I'm going to throw one more in because I'm sure this reflects the situation of a number of people who are attending today and that is I don't work for a member organization but I want to get involved and I want to start my path to becoming Tegaf certified what do you recommend I think you may have mentioned it earlier but it's worth repeating I think essentially how should I get going in learning A, you don't have to be a member so if you just want to get involved in learning things you do not have to be an employee of a member organization to do that if you want to get involved in in the open group that's a slightly different question so I'm assuming this is about getting involved in certification and you can do that just by going to our site maybe start by downloading some of the free information downloading the reference cards looking for some of the presentations I think we've got over 200 webinars out there so if you just want to take a webinar on what's in Arcumate or what's in Tegaf there are a lot of them out there you can just go down and watch those for an hour and get the feeling for it before you decide to go forward and again when you decide to go forward it depends what you want to do whether you want to self-study in your own time or whether you prefer to actually have a trainer guide you through 69 courses available plenty of choice and it is down to personal preference and budget and all sorts of things