 The Cyber Underground. I'm Jay Fidel. I'm singing for Dave Stevens today. And our guest is Percy Ellis from KCC. He's a lecturer there, and he teaches certification, among other things, information technology certification. We're going to talk to him about that. First, I got to tell you a story. It was October 2, 1965. I'm not sure you were born yet. And I saw my first computer. It was an IBM Don't Spindle and Utilate or Fold type with punch cards. It was in the FAA building, then known as the FAA building down in the entryway to Waikiki. And a guy named Lonnie Goldman showed me this thing. I couldn't believe it. A computer, an actual computer. Now look what's happened. We've got him everywhere. The problem is that they're more sophisticated, and there aren't Lonnie Goldman's around that can explain it to you. It's much more complicated. Actually, he's still around. And yeah. And so we need to be certified. We need to have education. And the public needs to know that we are educated. Because it's a jungle out there. There are problems in every operating system. It's not perfect. You need people who are experts. And that's what you lecture about, yeah? Yeah, exactly. How'd you get into it? Well, the certification. I was a Novel Network Administrator for Caltrans. That was my first job after I got my degree from San Diego State. And I was working on a problem. And we brought in some outside experts from Provo, Utah. And they were Novel Certified. And I asked them, well, how'd you get to be a Novel Administrator? I wanted to be able to do my job completely and not bring in these outside experts. And they said, well, you take an exam. And like I was saying to you earlier, they were the Maytag experts. Meaning you don't have to be an expert for equipment and operating system that doesn't need fixing. Yeah, well, they knew that equipment. They knew their gear better than someone who was a generalist. So they told me the process of preparing for the exam, studying for the exam. And then I took the exam and I passed it. And I became, that was my first certification. First certificate. Then you found out this has got to be part of it, Percy. You were good at it. Some people in the world who don't like to take tests, who are intimidated by tests. I mean, you can find them on every street corner. But Percy, you're good at it, aren't you? You like taking tests. And you like being certified. And you like teaching about certification. Yes, I did. I like taking tests because I like benchmarking my skills. So I like knowing that at one point in my life, I knew enough to get over a specific hurdle. And then teaching those certifications has been really valuable for me because I can pass the knowledge down to students. And then they can use these to build their resume. Because a lot of students don't have any experience. So they can use these certifications in lieu of experience. Yeah. When I went to law school, you had law teachers. But when you were finished, I took the bar exam. And they had separate teachers for the bar exam because you had to wrap your mind around exactly how that exam would work. Couldn't pass that exam. Couldn't practice. Your career was in jeopardy, right? So it was a different kind of approach. I'm going to tell you, here's the kinds of questions you can expect. Here's the kind of answers you can give and be right. And here's the ones you can give and be wrong. And so it was not, and not the substance philosophical discussion you got in law school. It was just, you know, practical. Take the test, pass the test. Is my distinction appropriate in the IT field? Absolutely. So after the Novel exam, I started, Microsoft came on the scene with Windows 95, Windows and T. And I saw that being the route I wanted to go. So I went the Microsoft route. But IT generalists tended to not take the certification exams. So they had no way other than their hands on experience to really prove that they were capable of doing a task. And they had learned best practices. So they kind of pinch and hold themselves by being, oh, say a Superdome, HP Superdome expert. And then when they needed to, say, switch jobs, they had to stay within that HP Superdome environment. They couldn't expand out into other related environments. So the other thing is that if you really do well in a given company, in a given machine or a given software, then you are the hero of the company on that. When you want to move, and moving is, you know, de rigueur in technology, everybody's always moving, you have to convince the next guy, the next IT manager, that you're worth the job. And, you know, you can just, you can reel off stuff you know, but it needs to be a common denominator, where he can tell that you really are qualified. And the best way in a complex field, you know, because the IT manager, the one interviewing you, him in, I know that much, actually. But if he has scores, if he sees certifications, he's much more likely to be convinced that you know your stuff. Am I right? Absolutely. Let's take office certifications. So your word, PowerPoint, Excel, I've certified in those applications. Now I could say, I know word processing, I know spreadsheets, but if I pass these exams with the Microsoft benchmarks, then the employer has something concrete that they can say, as far as proficiencies in these specific applications. And this goes through to the server products, exchange, SQL, all of the different products that Microsoft or Novell creates, and even the independent third party certifications like the CompTIA certifications. So you put it on your resume, of course. Absolutely. When you talk to that hiring manager, you're going to give them a resume, which has your certifications to demonstrate. And these are by organizations. We'll talk about that in a minute. But you're going to demonstrate to him that you've been certified just that, the other thing. Am I right to think, Percy, that the more certifications that you have on that resume, the more marketable you are, the more money you're going to make? Or is there a point where, you know, I'm qualified in D-Base 2, which went out in 1983. That may not be too persuasive to him, yeah. And that's one of the reasons I try to keep my certifications up to date. You can be kind of typecast as Novell, a network administrator, and then you're of no use to anyone because everyone's migrated away from Novell. So staying up to date is very important with your certifications. So he's going to be looking for certifications in currently popular, you know, deployed programs, among other things, yeah? Not necessarily. There are a lot of installations or operations where they're still using older software. So they may like the fact that your cobalt programmer or a network administrator, because they're still running NetWare 4 or NetWare 5, and they need someone who is proficient in those older technologies. They might be running Windows 2000 or I was somewhere and I saw Windows 7 on a desktop. A lot of people are still running older technology, so they may look for someone. But for the most part, you want to stay current. Yeah. Well, I mean, so I started my own experience coding in 1979. And, you know, I've been through a number and I'm not a professional, and I wouldn't claim to be on anything. But if I've been doing it a long time, and if I demonstrate that I have, you know, experience in the old ones, and maybe the ones that are 20 years and 10 years and five years old, am I am I going to know more? Is my does my experience in an older program account for his examination is a valuation of me for a job now in newer programs? I would think so because if you know the fundamentals of information technology, those haven't changed input processing output storage, right? And then the basic programming constructs like forenecks loops, straight line programming, systems analysis, how you go out and gather requirements for users needs, those haven't really changed. But so if you can write in pseudocode, sure, then you can change that to code is like words to describe what the functions would call for if it was real code. Yeah, absolutely yes. Then you can translate that to any modern code, say C sharp, Java, or C plus plus. So in the classes that you lecture here in KCC, are you are you? Well, you have to pick certain kinds of certifications you want to talk about. What if I walk into your class Percy, what are you going to teach me what certifications you're going to help me with? Well, right now I'm, I'm retired from Yuba College in Marysville, California. So I came here and I was teaching ICS 101, which is an intro to computer science class. So we don't talk too much about certification. We just talk about basic office applications, the word Excel PowerPoint. Oh, so you access, you're going to give them a foundation in foundational type software. Absolutely. Now we're thinking about introducing the CompTIA IT fundamentals certification into that course because that's a good place for students to get started with certifications. So they come out of the class not only with a good foundation in those applications, but something they can put on their resume. Yeah, which would be that certification. Now in terms of taking a test, I mean, I know, for example, we have tricasters here, the new tech switching product. That's we run the studio on that. And you can be certified in various models of tricaster. It's not an easy test. There has to be a proctor in the room. You know, it's all very serious. And a lot of people fail the test. Yes. And it costs money hundreds of dollars to even take the test. Yes. If you get to test, I suppose you're you're in a good position in the marketplace, although there aren't a lot of those machines here in Hawaii. And so I guess my question is, how do you prepare for a certification test? What do you read? What do you what do you do to get up to a level of knowledge and proficiency that you can score on the test? Well, first of all, hands on experience, you have to be able to look at the exam objectives, which are readily available on the CompTIA or Microsoft Novel or even Oracle website. So you look at the exam objectives and you go through those exam objectives and you make sure you can do everything that those read the materials. Yeah. Yeah. So you're going to read the materials and then you have to lab. So what have to just say you have to laugh. I think you should laugh everywhere about everything. Absolutely. He has a good sense of humor. Okay. And you need to set up a home lab with home equipment so you can say a machine with that software on it or several machines. Yeah, several machines if you don't have a lab at on campus or at your work site. So suppose I was rolling out 30 windows clients for a customer, I might try going to each desktop with the DVD. Well, that's one way of doing it. You might want to roll them out from a server so you turn on the machine and the software gets installed from a server. But each one of those methods is something that is part of the same windows deployment exam objectives. How do you know you're ready? You take practice tests. There's great practice tests available from cert blaster exam cram. Now pocket prep. And you take those tests until you're scoring 90 to 100% on those tests. But you don't want to be a paper certified person. True. Now, what's what is that? Doesn't that sounds, you know, sort of fragile, thin, not not really substantially knowledgeable. What is a paper certified person? People can take the exam and they're really good at reading questions and figuring out what the answer is. But they don't have any substance behind their experience. So they they're good at taking tests, but they didn't do the labs. They didn't. They don't have any hands on experience. So you need to either volunteer or intern and have some hands on experience doing what those exam objectives have outlined. And you have to feel that you have that level of, you know, understanding. It's like any subject, isn't it? You have to you have to integrate that somehow into your thinking. Does a coach help? You know, I for example, I do file maker, which is an Apple subsidiary. Yeah. And I have a coach in Indianapolis, and I call him every week or two and he answers my questions. And I learn a lot. I learn things I would never be able to figure out at least not easily myself. Does a coach help? I mentor and I tutor for a company called Parliament Tutors. And I'm tutoring young man in who's taking classes at the University of Phoenix. So being finding a mentor, and it's really easy to go to, say the Network Professionals Association or look online and find someone who's doing the job and kind of get them under your get under their wing. Yeah. So you don't coach in FileMaker, do you? I used to. Well, okay, but we didn't take a break. So I can ask you some questions about FileMaker. That's Percy Ellis with KCC. He's a lecturer in certification among other things in IT. We'll be right back. And when I talk to him during the break, maybe we'll tell you what he said. We'll be right back. He's an energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary. So I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stand Energy Man at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stand Energy Man. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Gabriele. I'm the host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science there. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Boy, that was good. You know, Percy is one of the few guys in Hawaii knows something about FileMaker and I am so glad to have met him about that. And after the show press, I want to show you what we have here in the studio using FileMaker because we use it for a lot of things. It's a relational database. It's been around for 25 years, I think. Yes. And it's one of those things where they keep on improving it. It's up to version 17 just came out. And it's relational now. It's not a 45. Completely relational. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah. So you can do a lot of things with it, including process text. So now it's for us, it's perfect because it's all drag and drop. Yeah. And coding. I'll show you some of the codes. It's got its own scripting language. Anyway, so if I have the certification in a computer subject and program or piece of gear, that's going to help me get more money in my job, isn't it? A lot of organizations say you were working for an organization that was FileMaker certified. And they were sending out consultants to organizations like yours. You'd want them to have FileMaker certified people come to your shop and help you with, you know, providing solutions, correct? Yep. So for some organizations, it's required to have certified people on staff. I know as part of our new, what is it called? Accreditation that we're getting. It's not a KCC. It's not actually accreditation, but it's a certification. They're looking for experience. And one of the ways we can show experience is by showing that we have people who are certified and have continued their education beyond, you know, their backslaves. Sure. And it goes to the point, if you're managing a company and you have software and it's you paid money for it, you worked on it, you adapted it to, you know, the company process, you want people to know how to use it really well so that you get the most out of it. It's an investment. The people are also an investment. You have to make sure everybody's on the same page. So if I were, you know, in charge of such a thing, I would say everybody go out and get certified. Yeah, I would really agree with that. I think your organization would definitely benefit by having as much of the staff checked out on that software so that they are getting the most out of that software. Because there's so many wrong ways to implement. Well, think I wanted to ask you about in terms of, you know, our view of the world and of news events. In January we had a false alarm in Hawaii with incoming missiles and the like by somebody who was sitting in front of a terminal and maybe something went wrong there. I don't think he was certified in anything. He had experience of that terminal but I'm not sure there was a certification involved. And the question is, you know, did you have that reaction? I mean was there a certification? Do you think that might have helped to avoid that? Well, depending on that particular software package, that sounded like there's something that was custom written so there probably wasn't a certification. But I was thinking about that very incident and it brought back an old adage from the computer world to air as human to really file things up requires a computer. And one pressed the button and he sent the world into a panic, right? Would a certification necessarily have helped? Maybe, maybe not. So certification isn't the end all be all of computer knowledge. Yeah. So but training is, in other words, training is. You have some companies, I don't care about certification, I just want my people trained. I want to be sure in my own standard, my own way of looking at them and interacting with my human resources that they know this stuff and they're using it right, they have the right sense about it. So I mean what's the connection between regular corporate training either in a school, you know, like you're doing or in-house like some companies do, they bring a trainer and certification. Do you need both? Can you live on one? Oh, I'd like to relate these two things that people deal with every day, food handler certification. Now you can hire a person and they can be a very good cook, but you still might want them to have that food handler certification. Whether they need it or not, it's something that you can put on your wall and when a person walks into the restaurant, they can see that they passed, your restaurants passed certain standards. Right, and they can assume that somebody decided what points it was important to teach the food handlers about. It's not at random, it was not casual, you know, there was a systematic identification of the issues and lessons involved and that person has been exposed to all those issues and lessons. So the other thing is that if it comes out of the whole thing, well comes out of the January incident about the false alarm, but it also comes out of the food handling mission. I mean these, this knowledge, whether it's reflected in training or certification or both, is often mission critical and it's beyond that it could be, you know, critical to the community such as the alarm. People could get sick in the restaurant, not so good. And so it goes beyond just, you know, sort of technical knowledge, it's whatever the company, the organization is doing, if that has an effect on the community, then the training and certification of the individual IT operator, for example, has an effect on the community too and it could be a profound effect. Yeah, so this means, this means that it's really important for the survival of the organization and the community. So I'm, I guess my question to you, Percy, is, is the government involved in these things? The government around, come around and say, you know, you must have certifications and this, that, and the other thing? Yes. So the Department of Defense has a DOD 8570 Information Assurance certification or initiative and they use the CompTIA A-plus, network plus, and security plus certifications to meet that initiative and that's for all of their personnel who are in the Information Assurance field. So once again, very mission critical. Yeah, that's tough like the food handler. Is that, is that, is there a statute or a regulation requiring food handlers to be certified? I would think so and I'm not really familiar with how restaurants are. Something the government should be looking at in any way. I believe that is a government regulation that says you have to, everybody who's handling food has to. You know, in a, in a world that is becoming more complex all the time, where the stakes are so high, you know, what we do in the service industries and certainly in information technology, it's got to be, you know, more in the future than in the past. What I mean is there's got to be some changes going on in this area, changes that you would teach about in your lectures, changes that the certification agencies and organizations are going to adopt. But how do you see those changes coming down? You must see them happening. You've been around for a while. How, how are they happening now? How are they going to happen in the future? Well, the certifications need to change as quickly as the industry changes, but it's really hard for these organizations to write products that change in such a fluid environment. So as, say, Microsoft comes up with a patch for a product, so they can't rewrite their certifications just for that particular patch of vulnerability. So about every three years they update their certifications and they update their products and then they do hot fixes and between those times. Is there a thing that's a long time given the amount of change that happens in three years now? It would be really nice to be able to say require professionals to change every year, but I think that'd be really too demanding. Every three years is even very demanding for a person to stay up to date. So CompTIA has something called a continuing education credits. Similar to, say, your law degree. You don't take the bar every three years even though things change. You continue your education, correct? Well, you have to go to continuing legal education, yeah. It's not that demanding in this state and other states, you know, from state to state it differs. But one thing that comes up in that, and I'm sure it comes up in IT certifications, too, is how do you know that the person sitting in front of you taking the test is the person, you know, who's getting the certification? What you don't want, you must see this, this must happen. When somebody else comes in, sits in the chair, he's really good, he's a certification expert person, he comes in, he takes he does a great job, scores very well, and it's not the right guy. I think that would be really difficult. I've taken 30 to 50 certification exams. I kind of take them for fun now. And when you take the exams, you're asked for multiple forms of ID. And they basically will take all of your possessions, so no cell phones. They've actually, if you're wearing glasses, they'll check for a camera embedded in your glasses. They'll check for little cameras embedded in your ties or your buttons on your shirts to make sure that you're not taking exam questions home with you. If they realize that this is big money stuff and how rigorous these exams are. So the odds of someone coming in and substituting themselves as you, I believe they're fingerprinting candidates. That's right. Well, it's appropriate. It's appropriate. And I suggest he was one of the reasons why these certifications do not change that often and, you know, are relatively formalistic. I mean, you could have, like in a newsletter, you can have a 10 question, questionnaire come to you every week, reflecting your reading in the subject that week. And, you know, 52 times a year you get a little questionnaire and somebody could, you know, analyze the information, the answers that you give and say, oh, he really knows his stuff because he's always right. On the other hand, he could always be cheating too. So in order to avoid cheating, you know, you have to have these formalities, I think. And so we have proctored exams. Yeah. And I've been through, like I say, 30 to 40 of these exams. And I can't see any way that someone could come in and substitute themselves for me. Yeah. Well, you know, the thing is that I don't, I don't look like Dave Stevens. So you probably know it's not Dave Stevens. By this time you probably know it's me, Jay. Percy, thank you. So I'm not going to be able to fool you in an exam. No, absolutely. Yeah. Thanks for coming down, Percy. Percy Ellis, a lecturer at KCC. Aloha. Aloha.