5/28/2008 -- One of the primary goals of certification is to verify that a candidate has skills relevant for today's workplace. Given that, I can think of no other skill more relevant for technicians and administrators than that of understanding "green."

Not only is green the new "low-fat" in the marketing world, but it's also a financial necessity -- especially in tough economic times. An administrator's ability to intelligently discuss options regarding power conservation, cost savings, recycling and other related issues has become an important factor in hiring. If an HR manager is trying to decide between two qualified candidates, but one understands how to save the company money and make the world a bit better in the process -- well, I can't imagine a scenario for not hiring that one.

Of all the IT certifications in existence, I can't think of two that would benefit more from adding this "green" content to their domains than A+ and Network+. Both are entry-level certifications with an emphasis on hardware and related issues. If CompTIA wants to lead the industry, I hope it will consider -- and act on -- this topic soon.

CompTIA Certification in High School
Speaking of A+ and Network+, this month, CompTIA and Pearson VUE teamed up to offer A+ and Network+ certification testing in the classrooms of six Chicago high schools.

This was the culmination of the schools' participation in CompTIA's Education to Careers (E2C) program, in which 500 Chicago students are currently enrolled.

The E2C program is available to all publicly or government-funded educational institutions as well as to not-for-profit organizations that train IT workers. Exams can be administered through either VUE or Prometric, and include the entire family of CompTIA "plus" certification exams.

New Security+ Update
One of the best-known vendor-neutral entry-level security certifications, CompTIA's Security+, is in the process of transitioning to a new exam that will be available in Oct. 14. The objectives can be found after you fill in the form here.

Though labeled an update, it's really a significant revision from the rolling update that was done about a year ago. The exam's five original domains have been broken into six. Previously, the largest domain had been General Security Concepts, weighted at 30 percent. While none of the information in that domain has been removed, it has now been spread throughout most of the other domains.

One of the biggest changes, surprisingly, is that the breadth of technology has been expanded a bit. As you might imagine, newer technologies have been added so that you have to keep your skills current, but topics like LANMAN and NTLM -- which weren't in the objectives for the previous iteration -- have been added.

Book of the Week: 'VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise'
One of the most informative books I've come across in a while is Edward L. Haletky's VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers.

While well-written and graphically rich, what made it most informative for me was its focus on security. There isn't one chapter among the 12 specifically dedicated to the topic; instead, it appears in Chapter Four and then permeates throughout all the other chapters -- as well it should.

At the end of the book, there's an epilogue on the future of virtualization, and its last two sentences sum up the entire topic as well as can be done:

"With planning and understanding of all the different subsystems that affect virtualization, it is easy to be successful with virtualization within the datacenter. Plan ahead, run the appropriate tests, and go forward and virtualize!"