I heard a rumour (from someone who did the course) that the training provided for Hubbell certification is more about advertising than anything related to doing a good job installing a network, although I guess few sparkies would bother training for home network cabling anyway. Fortunately you can generally trust them for power wiring!
The reason we are talking about 12-port patch panels is that the 8-port one usually installed in home network cabinets is flat and may not fit the tiny space left for it (and it looks like more than 8 cables). Not sure anything will fit, so sparkie may need to measure the space before buying a patch panel.