The institute for certification of computer professionals: a misnomer?

It probably goes without saying that most practitioners and teachers in the data-processing (computer) field think of themselves as "professionals". The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) calls itself a "professional society", and the many other computer related associations -the Computer Society of the IEEE, DPMA, ACPA, and AFIPS, to name a few -would no doubt take exception to being referred to as anything other than "professional societies." Indeed, one does not have to look far into the brochures and other literature promoting our associations to find that they are amply sprinkled with the words, "profession", "professional", and "professionalism" (DPMA, 1975; AFIPS, n.d.; Ralston, 1973). Despite the somewhat general assumption that those in the data-processing or computer business are professionals, there has been considerable literature published that would cause one to question this assumption (Wilensky, 1964; Rich, 1965; Canning, 1968; Wall, 1971; Stone, 1972; Skeen, 1974; Finerman, 1975 among others). Most of those who have looked deeply into the concept of professionalism agree that one of the prerequisites of a recognized profession (e.g., medicine, law, public aceounting, etc.) is a certification mechanism that separates those who possess certain agreed-upon "professional" credentials from those who do not. The dataprocessing field does not yet have this certification mechanism. This is so, despite the fact that the Data Processing Management Association (DPMA) b~gan a certification program as far back as 1962, with the initiation of the Certificate in Data Processing (CDP). For those who have forgotten or never heard about the CDP a few facts about this program might be in order.