Certification and Quantifying Relevant Skills

here is a lot of emphasis put on certifications in the hiring process. To a certain extent I can understand this, after all, Human Resources professionals are not Information Technology professionals and certification provides the only reliable interface they have for a quantifying whether an individual really knows something about the technology they claim to understand.

In my experience, though, I've run into far to many "certified" IT professionals that work wholly on rote procedure and couldn't think their way out of an Aristotelian syllogism, let alone solve an "out of the box" problem. Like so many students do with testing throughout their academic careers, certification tests are studied for, taken, and the content the test is intended to verify is promptly forgotten.

Technology changes rapidly, and far more important than the ability to memorize a procedure is the ability to think and creatively solve problems. Problems are a reality of IT, whether one is an administrator or a programmer. Time is most profitably spent in preventing problems which, while a largely thankless task, requires skills that certification can't test for - the ability to grasp correlations and patterns and anticipate outcomes.

There is way to test for this, though. Most IQ tests include components that test specifically for these skills. I recently joined the International High IQ Society and below are my scores based on the TA³ "Test for Above Average Abilities" and the attendant write-up for the relevant sections:

Verbal Analogies  154
     
The verbal analogies subtest assesses verbal comprehension, language development, learning ability, long-term memory, richness of ideas, and concept formation. Despite the fact that this subtest only measures crystallized intelligence, is culturally dependent, and doesn't involve logical, mathematical, spatial or any other specialized aptitude, it has a higher correlation to overall IQ than any of our subtests.

Spatial Visualization 136        

Spatial visualization involves isolating and identifying objects hidden in visual images and mentally rotating these objects to determine if they are identical in form (understanding the relationship of objects in an embedded figure...

...Your spatial visualization score is indicative of someone with an extraordinary ability to use inductive reasoning to extract patterns in life, perceive relationships, and draw conclusions.

Visual Sequencing 142        

This subtest is comprised of six sequential matrices questions which assess nonverbal reasoning. Nonverbal reasoning is the ability to perceive relationships, to draw conclusions (inductive reasoning), to formulate and test hypotheses, to use analytic reasoning, and your long term information retrieval...

...Your visual sequencing score is indicative of someone with a profound ability to visualize objects and situations in your mind and to manipulate those images, which is a cognitive skill vital in many career fields.

These scores are all beyond the second standard deviation, higher than over 99.5% of the population.  And, yes, this is blatant self-promotion.