Currently I am staying in the US with Marcel to participate in an Advisory Board for the definition of a new series of certifications.
Read this post from Marcel for some more of the details.
As Marcel said, when you have any ideas on how to do better certifications, please let me know and I can use this as input beside my own thoughts and experiences with selecting people to participate in projects and having done quite some software projects myself.
One of the things I want to get across is that matching the business needs from doing IT-projects is what counts, and not merely knowledge of features. You need to know how to apply and use those features in a customer context..
Btw, I must say that flying to the US is becoming more difficult each time... because of security restrictions we had to throw away all liquids and pastes from are handluggage. This effectively meant that I only could keep my razor blades (yes really :-)) and my toothbrush and that I had to toss out shaving cream, toothpaste etc. So on the first night we needed to do some shopping right away to replace those items... :-(
Hopefully I can keep the stuff on the way back....