With an eye toward deepening the global Linux talent pool, the Linux Foundation today announced that it will offer two new certifications for engineers and administrators.
The Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator, or LFCS, and the Linux Foundation Certified Engineer, or LFCE certificates will be granted to applicants who pass an automated online exam. The cost will be $300, although the foundation will hand out 1,000 free passes to attendees at LinuxCon, where the announcement was made.
"Our mission is to address the demand for Linux that the industry is currently experiencing," said foundation executive director Jim Zemlin, in a statement. "We are making our training program and Linux certification more accessible to users worldwide, since talent isn't confined to one geography or one distribution."
The foundation's Linux Jobs Report, issued in February, which surveyed more than 1,000 IT managers, says that better than 90% of those were looking to hire Linux-savvy workers within the coming six months, but that almost as many had trouble finding qualified applicants.
The LFCS and LFCE certificates are far from the only such certifications out there, however the Linux Professional Institute already offers a three-level cert program that covers much of what the Linux Foundation promises to teach in a distribution-agnostic fashion, and there are distro-specific certifications available for Red Hat, SUSE and other flavors of Linux.
However, the foundation highlights the fact that LFCS and LFCE will both be available via online tests at any time, as well as the fact that the tests themselves will feature real-world problems to be solved at the command line, rather than standard multiple-choice questions. The exams will also be offered in three different flavors of Linux CentOS, SUSE and Ubuntu.
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