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Why is BCS MTP important to individuals?

The BCS Mainframe Technology Professional (BCS MTP) programme gives ICT professionals working in the IBM mainframe environment the opportunity to:

Differentiate yourself in the workplace
As employers become more demanding, BCS MTP offers a way to externally quantify and verify your skills, experience and capabilities. With evidence of your abilities, you can always be confident that you will stand out from the crowd. BCS MTP also enables you to demonstrate drive and ambition to your employers, showing them that you are determined to prove your skills and progress your career.

Gain qualifications that prove your expertise
Gaining a BCS MTP qualification ensures that your skills and capabilities are recognised by your current employer. Employees that achieve or surpass an external skills benchmark demonstrate their professionalism and career development aspirations.

Identify strengths and weaknesses
By offering a structured modular approach, BCS MTP gives you the power to highlight your strengths, with exams in those areas and particular disciplines. It also highlights to you those areas where skills should be improved.

Plan structured career paths
The BCS MTP programme offers a structured route of certification that grows with your mainframe career. It offers an introductory range of qualifications for the whole industry, leading to more advanced qualifications as your skills, experience and capabilities develop. At the higher levels, these qualifications are available in specialisms, allowing you to demonstrate your particular skills, such as Security Administration, z/OS Systems Programming, Data Storage et cetera.

Choose your specialism
In many of the BCS MTP exams there are a number of optional or alternative units, enabling you to closely match your qualifications to the actual systems and software you use. Additional units can be taken to achieve a distinction at each exam, demonstrating your advanced expertise and capabilities.

  

Why is BCS MTP important to employers?

The BCS MTP programme demonstrates to internal and external customers the professionalism of data centres and their personnel. It also gives organisations a number of other vital benefits:

Increase competitive advantage for contracts and tenders
BCS MTP enables organisations to prove to external customers that their mainframe personnel (working on business-critical systems) have the required skills and expertise. This is especially important for companies competing in tenders who can prove unequivocally that their technicians are certified to a specific level of BCS MTP, verifying their skills and reassuring customers.

Assess, measure and benchmark skills
BCS MTP provides an internationally recognised benchmark standard against which employers can objectively assess and measure the technical mainframe-related skills and the progress of employees. This is invaluable for the recruitment of permanent and contract staff, as well as career development for existing employees.

Improve resource management
Through BCS MTP the assessment of an organisation’s current skill-sets and potential skills gaps is straightforward. This enables the skills and capabilities of your employees to be maximised, making resource management quicker, simpler and more effective.

Ensure effective recruitment
The BCS MTP examinations provide independent and credible verification of skills and capabilities in a practical way, enabling swifter recruitment and improving objectivity.

Enhance employee development
Investing in employees with appropriate qualifications ensures that your staff will feel valued. Individuals’ strengths and potential areas for development can be identified.

Retain independence and credibility
Unlike many IT certification programmes, BCS MTP is independent of any software or hardware vendors, ensuring impartiality and objectivity in assessment and guaranteeing credibility in the examination results. It is managed by BCS, an organisation that has delivered over 1 million examinations worldwide, and adheres to rigorous qualification writing and testing standards.
BCS MTP is a major step forward towards professionalism and objectively assessing technical skills and progress in the mainframe industry.
David Clarke, CEO, BCS