A couple of things have cropped up recently that have had me thinking about EA professional development, and how it fits in a HigherEd context. The first incident was something I was expecting to happen, namely that my TOGAF 8 Certification was about to expire. I know this as an email dropped in from The Open Group to tell me as much, and also offered me the chance to renew my certification for $300 plus local taxes. A snippet of the auto-generated email follows:
The benefits of renewal include:
- Continued entitlement to membership of the Association of Open Group Enterprise Architects (AOGEA) at no additional cost (www.aogea.org).
- Continued inclusion in the register of certified practitioners. Employers are increasingly seeking TOGAF certified practitioners and will check the register for proof.
- Continued rights to use the TOGAF Certified logo
Renewal is for a further two year period. You can renew during the 30 day grace period after your certification expired, the additional certification period will be added to the date on which your certification would have expired.In order to renew your TOGAF Certified as an individual for a further two year period you are required to pay a $300 fee (plus local taxes if applicable).
What’s surprising about the full text of the mail is that it doesn’t actually refer to continuing education or training in any form. There’s no mention of TOGAF 9 or any direct career benefits of continued professional development at all, other than being able to ‘keep the badge’ for TOGAF 8. This is, perhaps, no different to any other form of certification in IT-related realms, but it still misses the mark for me. I mean, what would be the point of extending for 2 years? What would it actually provide that was of direct use to us as an organisation? How would spending $300 for continued certification stack against, say, paying for someone to attend ArchiMate training instead?
The second area of interest is around the ‘Enterprise Architect’ role, and how the sector is starting to get to grips with making use of EA in the current business climate. I have to confess that I haven’t seen many institutions (any institutions?), in the UK at least, actually hiring EAs. It’s still more the case that the kind of activities an EA would undertake are hidden in other jobs or spread across multiple roles.
However, according to the weekly digest from Jobs.ac.uk, we now have our first ask for Enterprise Architects (plural) at Bournemouth University. The two roles on offer actually split the domains out to be one concentrating on Communications and the other on Infrastructure and Information. You can get at both job descriptions here.
From what’s presented, it looks very much like both posts are primarily technology-focussed domain specialists with a demand for project management skills on top. So the question is, are they really looking for Enterprise Architects, or is it still a mismatch of expectation and ask? If it’s the latter, what are we missing in shaping the EA agenda in HE? Discuss.
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Paul lives, rides and works in Cardiff, South Wales. His work seems to largely entail fixing things and keeping wheels on. Officially, he is actively engaged and interested in Enterprise Architecture these days, but has a secret past that involved standing around on glaciers collecting meltwater samples, and walking through endless fields of wheat taking radiance measurements. 