The Open Group Certified IT Specialist (Open CITS) Program

The Open Group Certified IT Specialist (Open CITS) certification represents an ideal mechanism for demonstrating knowledge, success and overall business capabilities. The Open CITS program can significantly enhance and affirm your professional skills, improve your prospects for rewarding assignments, accelerate salary and career advancement, and result in greater peer recognition.

Quotes from Certified IT Specialists:

• "The Open Group certification has helped me build business relationship with my customers. This additional certification gives me recognition that I have been qualified by more than a just a vendor alone and one of my clients has since included me in their storage planning efforts and strategy for this year."
• "I recently completed an IT Optimization study for a large public sector client. The General Manager/CTO noticed the "Open Group Master Certified IT Specialist" on my email footer and commented on it positively. This certification helped my creditability personally and the company by illustrating to our customers that we put our "best foot forward" for them."
• "I am dealing mostly with clients in China and titles and credentials are very important to them."
• "At a recent conference I was introduced as an Open Group Master Certified IT Specialist to 50 customers, and at least 5 came up to me after and discussed their participation and confidence in The Open Group."
• " There are certain customers that do look at certifications and this has helped me with credibility and acceptance by those customers."
• " On several occasions I was asked by our partners about the certification process so that I had the opportunity to explain our role in the Open Group certification program. This clearly signals our commitment to maintaining high skill level of our IT profession community. This directly translates into respect and trust among our partners."

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Open up your Career - for Individuals

For organizations, the Open CITS program provides an independent, global, experience-based benchmark for identifying, assessing and selecting the most qualified individuals for critical roles and responsibilities. Specifying Open CITS-certified individuals in procurement and project proposals can considerably reduce recruitment time and cost, and result in higher project success rates.

Open CITS can help to optimize the staff recruitment and retention process, and motivate staff to acquire this widely recognized industry standard to authenticate their skills and experience.

Organizations can also utilize The Open Group materials to build their own professional certification programs, and apply the Open CITS program structure to enhance their own learning and development programs.

Philips IT has used the Open CITS program as part of the project to tranform their internal IT department. To find out more about Competence Development at Philips IT, you can:-

Download a webinar by Paul Nijenhuis, Competence Group Manager, Philips IT, by visiting our Webinar archive	Download the case study

In a marketplace where confidence is a key purchasing factor, suppliers can demonstrate their expertise by showing that they use certified IT specialists for specific projects. Open CITS certification is a powerful competitive differentiator that provides your customers with reliable assurance of the skills and capabilities of your IT professionals, and of the quality and interoperability of your products.

“Credit Suisse’s IT division is required to provide high-quality, innovative and cost-efficient technology solutions to our integrated global bank. In order to achieve our goals, it is critical that we attract and retain the best IT professionals in the market.
By following industry best practices, The Open Group has defined an outstanding benchmark for IT Architects and IT specialists, which makes it easier to identify the highly skilled and experienced professionals that Credit Suisse is looking for. In addition, I am very much in favor of The Open Group’s efforts to certify skills and experience, rather than academic qualifications only.”
Andreas Buzzi
Head of Software Engineering
Credit Suisse
 
“Our services are often delivered in a worldwide, distributed context. Increasingly we will be staffing our projects from multiple sources, potentially both from inside and outside the organization, as well as from multiple continents and suppliers. Envision a complex network of partners, alliances, providers, clients and even competitors. To thrive in this boundaryless environment, it is paramount to have a standardized view of the skills, experiences and competencies of the IT specialists involved. The Open CITS program will help organizations find and select the right resources, and it is even more relevant now that regulatory compliance demands demonstrable quality of service.”
Ron Tolido
CTO
Capgemini, Nederland B.V.
 
“Internally IBM has had a program that validated the technical skills, experiences, and knowledge of our IT Specialists for over a dozen years. In addition, our program has demanded our specialists meet documented standards related to professional skills, such as oral and written communications, and project management.  In working with The Open Group on the development of Open CITS, it was important to IBM that both technical and professional skills and abilities be assessed as part of the program – to allow for the development of well-rounded specialists that can offer our clients maximum value in a consistent fashion across a worldwide marketplace.  The Open CITS program provides for that holistic assessment.”
Phil Stauskas
Distinguished Engineer
IBM

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Open up your Opportunities - for Suppliers
 
 
 
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Open up your Workforce - for HR
 
 

T-shaped people are individuals who are experts or specialists in a core skill, but who also have a broad range of skills in other areas. A T-shaped person combines the broad level of skills and knowledge (the top horizontal part of the T) with specialist skills in a specific functional area (the bottom, vertical part of the T). They are not generalists because they have a specific core area of expertise, but are often also referred to as generalizing specialists as well as T-shaped people.
 
T-shaped people work well in teams because they can see a situation from a different perspective, can reduce bottlenecks, fill skills gaps, and take on new skill sets quickly. This then leads to higher team productivity and greater flexibility.
 
The Open CITS program measures an individual’s core competence in a specific stream or domain. However, it also covers a broader range of skills and competencies related to people, business, project management, and architecture. In addition, the program looks at an individual’s work experience, professional development, and community contribution. The Conformance Requirements of the program are mapped against the individual’s skills and experience rather than a body of knowledge, and we assess people skills as well as technical abilities. Therefore, if it’s T-shaped people that you are looking for, then hiring somebody with Open CITS status is a good place to start.
 
Read about T-Shaped People on The Open Group Blog

General news about The Open Group and Open CITS, including press releases and press coverage, can be accessed here in our News pages, but specific detailed news about CITS developments can be found on our Open CITS News page.