Recently I came across an article entitled The Death of Paper MCSEs. The article discusses changes in Microsoft's certification testing process to make it harder to pass. That bring back memories.

Back in the early 90s I was lucky enough to have received my CNE. A CNE is a certified Netware Engineer. At the time there were less than 100 in my state and less than a few thousand in the country. It was a great time.

My teammate and I had just come off a project converting a multi-thousand user network from 3Com's 3+Open and 3+Share to Novell Netware. We had worked out a deal with our company that they'd send us to a CNE boot camp and then pay for our testing when the project was over.

During the year it took to completely move the network over we calculated our effort was actually two full time jobs for each of us. Needless to say, the CNE courses were relief.

The CNE boot camp was a joke. Both he and I ended up teaching more of the class than the instructor. My teammate sailed through his tests, but it took me a few times to get through Networking Technologies. I digress ...

Prior to our conversion we hired a consultant to help us with the scripting and batch files needs for the network. The lady came to our site and assured us she was a CNE. We were pumped. We had so many questions for her it was overwhelming. So overwhelming in fact she started crying. Evidently she was a paper CNE.

I started using that term right then and there and even authored a few online articles that were passed among BBS.

Can I prove I started the term paper CNE? Not at all.

Does it give me some measure of pride knowing I did. Yes.

Bookmark/Search this post with:
delicious | digg | reddit | furl | google | yahoo | technorati | icerocket