Re: [Fsfe-uk] qualifications

[Alex Hudson]

Dave Crossland wrote:
> Marketting, PR, advertising; these are schemes to build trust that are
> more effective than certificates and grades. If they were less
> effective, we would all use certificates and grades in our purchasing
> decisions. That we don't puts the lie to how important they are.
>   

Well, certainly some people use them, otherwise we wouldn't have 
associations and chartered institutions (which are more popular in some 
industries than others: in IT, few people recognise chartered status, in 
others like planning it seems to be virtually mandatory).

Can you give an example of such a scheme which is more effective? 
Perhaps there are some local ones, but I can't think of many on a 
national basis...

> I think learning ought to be driven directly by a person's needs, and 
> that learning cannot be benchmarked :-)

If you can determine someone's learning needs, you can measure the 
change in need over time and thus benchmark what they've learned, surely?

Personally I don't believe there are many things you can't measure, and 
learning certainly isn't one of them.

Cheers,

Alex.