I’ve worked in the Australian ICT market for some 8 years now as a manager, and one thing I have never done is employ an Australian Computer society (ACS) member (not by design – it’s just something that never came up). I had my own encounter with the ACS of course when I migrated here, as they had to ‘verify’ my UK-awarded degree certificates and Microsoft-accredited certifications (for which they levied a fee of several hundred pounds). Since then I have received occasional unsolicited mail from them inviting me to join their society and a couple of times it prompted me to look at their website for further information, but I never saw any real benefit to part with $430 for my first years’ membership & application fee.
The ACS boasts of some pretty high ideals, such as “the ACS is the public voice of the ICT profession”, and also claims to be the “guardian of professional ethics and standards in the ICT industry, with a commitment to the wider community to ensure the beneficial use of ICT.”
Yet as I mentioned above, after 8 years in the ICT sector in Perth, now looking after an interstate network of 7 sites, and having worked within the higher education, Federal and State political sectors, I have never seen the ACS do one useful thing along the lines of its stated goals.
I think I may have worked alongside a couple of members at some stage, but they didn’t jump out at me as super-heroes of ICT excellence, and I never saw them take a special lead in establishing or championing standards or providing insider knowledge of anything I didn’t already know or couldn’t have learnt from the mainstream education or news sectors.
I’ve also not noted the ACS do anything public to champion the industry – beyond co-sponsoring a couple of conferences, but that is just so much incestuous member trawling and doesn’t impact on many outside of the industry.
I only raise the point now as I see recently that the ACS has been advising the Federal government’s Gershon review into ICT expenditure, and one of the editorial pieces I saw by a senior ACS member summarised their recommendations as including:
- Major ICT projects are staffed with qualified and accredited ICT professionals;
- Companies tendering for major projects should identify key staff and their qualifications and accreditation credentials;
- Career support programs are available to help ICT professionals within Government to obtain appropriate accreditation;
- Recruitment processes for senior Government ICT roles address the issue of ICT professional accreditation.
So there are 4 recommendations, each of which contains the word ‘accreditation’! Can we guess what the future would look like if the ACS gets its way? I actually did see a job advertised once that stated that ACS membership was a preferred prerequisite for the role, so it seems that the ACS-inspired notion that everything accredited (by them) must therefore be good can in fact find a resting place once in a while.
This is a dangerous path to follow. The job of accreditation is one that is properly undertaken by our educational system, and the evidence of an academic degree (or professional certificate award program) cannot be verified in any additional or more meaningful way by a third party body. It certainly does not follow that a simple paid membership of a club makes the member any better qualified or professional than any other candidate, and to suggest so is discriminatory and very narrow-minded. The nightmare scenario of course would be that certain ’senior government ICT roles’ are advertised with a prerequisite for compulsory membership of the ACS, which would be an appalling situation to find ourselves in – and would benefit no one, except of course the coffers of the ACS.
This notion of paid-for membership of a professional guild is medieval in its original and attitude, and it certainly is inconsistent with the modern technical age. If I want to consider an additional verification of a potential employee, I would be better off searching for their MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter account than scouring the membership list of the ACS. At least then I would see that I am getting someone aware of and active within the modern trends in the industry, and their professionalism and ethics will have been thoroughly assessed by the online community to which they belong, and the history of their comments on a range of issues would of course be there for me to read.
Indeed this is more of the future we should recommend to the government, and in fact more likely to be the one we end up with – online peer reviews of me, my work, and my professionalism and ethics, written by people who actually know me and my work. The ACS may claim that they are doing just this very thing through their local chapters, but the trouble with clubs like this is that they have an unhelpful propensity of sticking up for their fellow chums regardless – far better to have the reviewing done by colleagues with nothing to gain from it in terms of influence or funds.
So hopefully the government will not fall into this ACS-baited trap, and instead will allow the managers undertaking recruitment within their agencies to make up their own minds on the professionalism and ethics of applicants. If there is any doubt then of course there is the ever-available option of bringing in a professional 3rd party opinion – no, not the ACS – a recruitment consultant.
