How PEGA CLSA Certification can be made even better..

I have been working in PEGA for about 11 years, and I recently completed the CLSA certification.Having spent about 6-7 months going through the rigours of the PEGA Accelerated CLSA Program, I think I am uniquely placed to make this heartfelt confession: it is time for the CLSA Certification process to change, and PegaSystems should (at the cost of sounding ironic) “Make CLSA Great Again!”.

CLSA Certification is currently the most coveted certification PEGA has to offer, and I am sure all the certified LSAs are PEGA resources who are at the top of their game. But the sheer number of CLSAs I currently see in LinkedIn has lessened the sheen somewhat: after all, if you find 24-carat diamonds being sold in all of your local jewellery shops, the next diamond ring gift to your partner does not look so alluring, does it ?

Here are my list of suggested changes:

 (1) Mandatory 5 years Industry Experience :

With respect to all the brilliant techies out there, 2 years of working in PEGA does not qualify one as an LSA. Sure, one can have incredible technical skills, but those are skills earned as a Senior Developer, not as an LSA, and the developer is usually working under another more-experienced PEGA lead who is making all the important decisions.

An LSA is supposed to make 

 — Decisions to differentiate between a small change having huge impact later, or a bigger change which might be costly in the short term but would promote re-usability and save effort in 6 months time, and 

  — Effectively communicate to the relevant parties the decided changes, and defend his/her choices accordingly. 

With humility,I have to say this:in our current IT Industry, the ability to “say what you built, and build what you say” comes only with hard-earned experience.

 (2) Have a Submission Interview: 

Create a Panel of experienced LSAs, and the CLSA candidate should be made to defend their design choices in front of this panel. Replacing the written design document with an interactive Interview session would mirror the real world, where an LSA is asked to defend their design decisions in face-to-face meetings with relevant parties, not asked to submit a written design document. 

(3) Value more than just Out-of-the-Box (OOTB) implementation : 

OOTB is how PEGA coding and design should be implemented, and PEGA is doing a very good job to ensure that LSAs have a good grasp on all OOTB features. But I somehow feel we are too beholden to it : customers in real world often have unconventional needs, and they sometime require innovative problem-solving, and not just adherence to OOTB features.

The CLSA App Build has been one of the most interesting exams in my life, and I learned a lot of new PEGA features while I was working on it. I feel, with a little course correction and re-evaluation of the exam methods, the exam would be able to make its standards better and more attuned to the real-world scenarios a budding LSA would face.