Abstract:

Since the rising of the Software Industry, the certification has played an important role as a way of controlling the access to this labor market and for recognizing the competences of the individuals on specific areas. Thereby a lot of certifications on the Information & Communications Technologies field has arisen and proliferated. Cuba needs this kind of acknowledgments for its products and specialists at the same time it’s trying to introduced itself on the ITC global market. This article describes the proposal of a process to integrate the certification of roles most commonly found on industry to the training stage of engineers on Informatics Sciences.
The proposed process has a fundamental presumption: the trainee is already working at a job where he can play one or more of the generally accepted roles. The ability for playing those roles should be acquired by the individual on his transit for the college. The process is divided on four stages. The fist one is the definition or update the profiles based on competences for the permitted roles. The second one is the conformation by the student of an e-portfolio with the evidences of his performance. Next stage is the invitation to the process and the evaluation of candidate´s portfolios. On this stage, the candidate makes a self-evaluation of the status of his competences and provides evidences for justifying his status. After checking over the candidate´s performances, the issue or not of the certificate for the acknowledgment of the role is decided. If the result is negative, the candidate will receive the reasons for denying his certificated at the next stage. So, the fourth and last stage is the closing of the process. On this stage certificates for accrediting the role are issued for those candidates whom passed the process.
In contradistinction to the traditional certification processes on Software Industry which were carried out through some test over controlled environments, the essence of the proposed process is to make an evaluation of the individual´s performances supported on evidences of his previous work on the productive process he participated. This evaluation is carrying out considering the importance of the constant dialog with the candidate for informing him about his status compared to the standard required. The core of the proposed methodology is the certification of specific and generic competences contained on the profiles of competences for the permitted roles. This process was applied on a pilot test during the academic year 2009-2010 and good results were achieved, demonstrating an improvement on the professional skills of the students. As a result of applying this methodology, an improvement on the acquisition of professional skills of the Engineer on Informatics Sciences could be achieved.

Keywords:

Certification, competences, software industry, collaboration college enterprise.