Should software professionals be licenced/certified?
Date: 27 Oct 1994 This is a very controversial and political question. Generally, certification is something voluntary, while licencing is regulated by governments. Certification generally means some agency warrants you meet its standards; licencing generally means that to claim to practice a certain profession requires a government licence, often administered through a professional organization. In theory both are supposed to help judge if someone is capable of doing certain jobs. Licencing isn’t currently required for computing professionals; some people would like to see some jobs require it, as with established branches of engineering. Others don’t like government intervention, and/or believe many people who wouldn’t get licenced are perfectly competent. Computing professionals in the USA have had a certification program for years, administered by the Institute for Certification of Computer Professionals (708-299-4227), a meta-organization with representatives from ACM, IEEE-CS, AD
