Is there a professional certification available for QGIS users?
Update Edit 06/03/2020. Yes - the QGIS open source project now offers a Certification program which one can apply to.
The QGIS Certificate Program is designed to promote both community involvement in the QGIS project and quality education for QGIS software. As such the application process requires applicants to both detail their contributions to the QGIS project and make their training materials available for review. Contributions to the QGIS project include activities such as:
Development/commits to QGIS
Contributions to the QGIS documentation and training materials
Translation of QGIS materials
Authoring plugins
Filing bug reports
Financially supporting new feature development
Financial contributions to and sponsorship of QGIS
Involvement in your local QGIS User Group
Publication of open QGIS course ware
Authoring QGIS books
![QGIS Workflow Certification Diagram
You are required to provide the training material for each of your courses. This includes exercises, lectures and data. This material will be reviewed for currentness, accurate representation of the QGIS project and overall quality. If the material is not of adequate quality, this can be cause for refusal.
Following an initial review, the application will be sent to local QGIS groups for their opinion. This portion of the review should take place in less than one month. If there is not a local QGIS user group the QGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) will make a determination based on material provided and your reputation in the community. In this latter case you are encouraged to establish a local QGIS User Group. If you are not deemed to be a member of the QGIS community in good standing this can be cause for refusal.
The PSC will make the final determination. If accepted as a QGIS Certified Organization your contributions to the project will be published for transparency.
If approved you are required to make a €20 donation to the QGIS project for each certificate. This creates a mechanism for financial support of the project. Payments for certificates are made using online credit card transactions.
You can apply through this form (make sure to first create a login). You can find more details about the certification programme here (we advise you to read this before registering).
Here are several other options, from March 2019 this is information I've come across via this
blog post from NRGS - "NRGS and QGIS Certification" where the author highlights
Another option for a QGIS 'certificate' I found was a 5-sequence course offered by a College in the US - Del Mar College. That offer a certificate in 'Open Source Geospatial Technology'. It was also covered by a GIS content Magazine here
The five courses include:
GST 101—Introduction to Geospatial Technology Using QGIS
GST 102—Spatial Analysis Using QGIS
GST 103—Data Management and Acquisition Using QGIS
GST 104—Cartography Using QGIS and Inkscape
GST 105—Remote Sensing Using QGIS and GRASS The courses are designed to be self-contained complete with all the theory, software instruction, and sample data required to learn at home or office, at your own pace.
Also, in elsewhere I found these programs available:
In British Columbia, Canada there is a program offered by Langara providing a certificate
the curriculum of this program is based on sound principles common to the entire field of GIS, and the classes will be conducted using QGIS
In India, there is a Certificate course in Public Health using QGIS here
As alluded to above myself and Phil Davis (Del Mar College) have been working on a new cohort of the GeoAcademy set to begin this spring.
A little background on the GeoAcademy: The GeoAcademy was founded in 2013, when Dr. Phil Davis brought together subject matter experts to author the first ever GIS curriculum based on a national standard, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Geospatial Competency Model (GTCM). The GTCM is a hierarchical model of the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s) needed to be a working GIS professional in today’s marketplace. These KSA’s were vetted by forty U.S. college GIS educators. Since 95% of U.S based colleges and universities use a single vendor's GIS software, it was decided the GeoAcademy should be built using free and open source software (FOSS4G). Over the summer of 2014 the exercises were beta tested on Canvas by over 3,000 students. The first edition of the GeoAcademy was released in September 2014. (The GeoAcademy labs are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.)
Since its development, the GeoAcademy curriculum has been presented at several FOSS4G conferences and is being used by many professors in their GIS programs. An online GeoAcademy MOOC has over 5,000 enrollees. In 2015 the GeoAcademy team was honored to win the Global Educator of the Year Team Award by GeoForAll.
We have also been discussing a QGIS certification as part of this cohort with Tim Sutton (QGIS PSC Chair). The initial proposal is to have QGIS host a Certification page similar to the Commercial support page. It would list all certification providers. Each provider would need to be approved by the PSC or a certification team lead. This proposal has yet to be approved by the PSC.
The GeoAcademy courses would be the first, but hopefully not the last, program to offer QGIS Certification through this page. To obtain certification via this pathway, students will need to pass all courses at a certain level to be offered the QGIS certificate, and complete a capstone course. This will involve conducting a project of their own design under mentorship of the instructor. The capstone will include a project proposal, final report and presentation of results.
For more experienced users wanting certification, we would offer an exam in lieu of the 5 GeoAcademy courses. More experienced users would need to pass the exam and then complete the capstone to achieve QGIS certification.
I'll post a follow up once the proposal has been voted on.
There are plenty of QGIS training providers around the globe:
http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html
Some of these are certified. For example in the UK, the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) accredits courses from both:
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