Why Are There So Few MEF-CECPs? (Or, Are There?) (Part 1 of 3)

My colleague Asad (Naveed) on the Carrier Ethernet Linked In Group, from Pakistan Tele-Communications Ltd. (PTCL) recently (Aug. 9, 2012) became the very first (and, so far, the only!) MEF-CECP (Carrier Ethernet Certified Professional)  from Pakistan, and we all celebrated his success! Asad shared some great information on how he went about his preparation and what he studied, which I’ll let you get from the discussion on our Linked In Group. (BTW, I digress, but PTCL has a really nice explanation of its vision, brand philosophy, brand values, and strategy here, which is worth reading – clearer, better, and warmer than many others I’ve seen.)  

Sam (Masud) then provided a recent blog post he wrote on the MEF-CECP Certification, giving details about the exam (80 multiple choice questions in just under two hours), statistics on how many CECP’s there are globally (350 at present, with 50% from service providers, with PLDT leading the pack, and a little more than 33% from vendors), and how many succeed in their first attempt (about 66%). (For another detailed perspective on the MEF-CECP exam here’s a great post from Carrier Ethernet News, and here’s a link from Carrier Ethernet for Dummies.)

Sam said something at the end of his post “The certification is good for business, good for your career, and, most importantly, good for customers who want to take advantage of the capabilities offered by the lowest-cost-per-bit technology,” which immediately made me think about a discussion on MEF-CECP Certification that we had on the Carrier Ethernet Group here a couple months back. That was a discussion I had with Daniel (Bar-Lev), Director, Certification Programs at the MEF, and Chandra (Mallela) of Vitesse Semiconductor, another colleague on this Group very active in our discussions.

The question there was essentially this (raised by Azhar (Khuwaja), another one of our keenly active members), and I’m recasting it here: “Why are there so few MEF CECP’s so far, and (by extension) what is the value of a MEF CECP Certification to the industry (and how many might one expect)?” (BTW, there was a similar question Anuradha (Udunuwara) of Sri Lanka Telecom (one of the first batches of MEF-CECPs) raised here late last summer.)

To answer this we’ll need to delve a bit deeper, which we do in Part 2.

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