Q&A: Gene Salois, Vice President of Certification, CompTIA
In our first interview with Gene Salois, vice president of certification at CompTIA, he talks about transitioning into his new role, current program decisions and what he sees for the future of certification.
by Becky Nagel
8/13/2003 -- Gene Salois joined CompTIA in September 2002 as vice president of certification, replacing Lutz Ziob, who moved on to head Microsoft's certification program.  Salois is responsible for leading the association's certification initiatives for certification programming and development. Prior to CompTIA, Salois served as the director of certification programs and performance assessment for Lucent Technologies for five years. In this role, he led multinational task forces to establish Lucent's worldwide training certification program requirements for distributors, resellers, service agents, customers, partners and employees to meet the organization's strategic goals and objectives. Salois also served as the global educational services manager for Xyplex Networks and as an educational consultant for Creative Courseware Concepts and Digital Equipment Corporation. He holds a masters of arts in education from St. Regis University in Worcester, Mass.
A few weeks back we got our first chance to interview Salois about his role at CompTIA, changes within the program over the past year and what he sees for the future of both his program and certification in general. Here's what he shared with us:
What attracted you to this position at CompTIA?
Gene Salois: The attraction was a very small yet robust environment. I was surprised at how well CompTIA had done in the industry regarding certification. Where I came from we were predominantly focused in more of a datacom and telco world, so seeing what CompTIA was doing for...perhaps we'll call them more foundational titles...was particularly intriguing.
What challenges did you face when you came into the position?
Salois: Probably my biggest challenge was coming from a for-profit public company into a not-for-profit trade association...The ability to make significant changes and the consequences of the changes are much more acute in a trade association, whereas at a place like Lucent I might have had more ability to recover from missteps in strategic direction. In a trade association such as CompTIA, every day the decisions have significant impacts.
I would think with a not-for-profit you'd actually have more flexibility because you're not necessarily always thinking about the bottom line, or are you thinking about it more?
Salois: The ability to recover [is better] at Lucent because it had things such as product sales, service, offerings...let's face it, Lucent is not known as a certification company.
As a trade association, CompTIA is based on membership, so the reporting ability [from] our members is much more significant than it would be at a publicly held company such as a Lucent.
How do you feel about the overall slate of certifications that CompTIA is offering right now? Do you have the right mix?
Salois: That's something that I find will always be evolving as technologies come and go. Some of the technologies that I thought would be around forever 20 years ago are long gone. I think we have a very balanced approach to what our membership has asked for.
In 2001 CompTIA added eight certifications. You released only one certification in the last year, and dropped plans for Wireless+. Are the financial realities of the certification market today affecting your decisions as far as how much to roll out and when to roll it out?
Salois:What is going on in the certification industry has [an impact] on the decision of what to consider for rollout. There's many other things...I'll go back to the first criteria: "Is the membership driving [this]?"
As for Wireless+, what I've seen is that we still have not, as an industry, standardized across the globe on wireless protocols and standards...that pretty much drove us to put Wireless+ on hold.
Are you currently developing any new certifications, or considering other areas?
Salois: We keep continuing to look at what we think may be an appropriate plan to develop additional services or perhaps to retire services. Again, that's really back to the members driving what they feel is appropriate, as well as looking at what we can capably support. I certainly don't want to move in a direction until I'm quite certain that we can support it.
Any of those that you're ready to publicly announce -- either new ones or to retire?
Salois: It's really a bit premature yet. I know that I have some options to consider, but we definitely want to make sure we do a stringent market analysis to validate [any decisions].
Are you ever surprised about how much reaction articles regarding your certification exam prices receive? For example, when we wrote about CompTIA's decision to end stand-alone voucher sales, that got a lot of negative reaction from readers. Do you notice it when it happens, and do you take that into consideration when making future pricing decisions?
Salois: Price is always a concern, especially in these current economic times. However, what we're trying to do now is bring some discipline to our processes and how we position our certification offerings out there. Around the voucher piece, that was really to better protect the benefits we're trying to provide through our membership.
What would you say to those that say CompTIA exam prices are just too high?
Salois: I believe the educational experience is the area that we should all focus on -- around training, certification, experience. They all count, and they all have a contributing cost. And if we look at that, I believe most people will find that the actual validation of their expertise, which provides the greatest value in a career, is a very small percentage of the overall educational experience.
It's...about the rigor involved in developing certification. It's about the acceptance of our certifications in the industry and our desire to maintain that level of respect, if you will, that require us to put in a significant amount of effort in ensuring the rigor and the value. From that comes the cost associated with the exams.
What is your goal for the CompTIA certification program over the next year?
Salois: It's multi-faceted. In the current economic climate all of us are operating within, we have an objective to maintain stability of our programs, our presence in the market. As an addendum to that, [we will] continue to instill discipline and rigor into how we develop our offerings and how we deliver them, and then measure the impact we're having on the IT industry. I think that's probably a very critical key for me here at CompTIA -- to find a way to really measure the impact we're having.
Will you be further expanding the relationships between CompTIA certifications with other certification programs over the next year?
Salois: Absolutely. It's extremely important to us. I believe they're valued by employers, they're valued by other certifying bodies. We're seeing interest from academic institutions around CompTIA certs. I believe a lot of that is attributable to the way CompTIA certs are built with complete industry involvement versus, say, a vendor-specific certification that may have been built solely within the confines of that vendor's organization or company. That's very gratifying, yet at the same time just causes us to really focus in on how we can do that better.
How do you think that the certification industry itself is going to change over the next three years?
Salois:I think there will be increased levels of security on test delivery. There will be increased attention paid to the absolute mapping of certifications into job functions. I believe it will become much more an integrated part of the academic channel. I really think that is...a primary focus over the next few years, and I've heard the same from several of my peers in the industry.
That it will become more and more part of the academic world...would you say less and less with independent training?
Salois: I wouldn't say that. I believe that the independent training will evolve to offer a complementary type service. I believe this is all about the training companies, the academic institutions -- we're looking at job readiness for the new workforce. And as you've seen, I've been around for a while. The workforce will be coming. I've seen some interesting studies about IT jobs in the future and the demand for the IT jobs, and I think that is one of the driving reasons behind academics becoming more involved with IT training companies.
Where do you think CompTIA's certification program will be in three years?
Salois:I think you'll see an evolving offering of services, and that goes back to our earlier conversation around technologies come, technologies go. We need to make sure we stay current while still maintaining some basis of product and service that accounts for more legacy systems. I think that will be a very important part for us, and I think you'll also see CompTIA certifications become more of a mainstay in the academic channels. Perhaps we'll be moving towards sponsorship or support of governing bodies across the globe; I think that's critical as we try to always increase our international presence is to work very closely with those specific government. 
Becky Nagel, editor of CertCities.com, is an award-winning journalist with almost 10 years experience covering the tech industry. She was hired to create CertCities.com in 2000, and has been editor of the site since. She can be reached at .
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