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Are IT Certifications Meaningless?
superflippy writes "In his article Hiding Behind Certification, MIT's Michael Schrage argues that CIOs who rely too heavily on certifications as a measure of an employee or sub-contractor's abilities are wasting their companies' money."
Wow, this article finally affirms what I've always known -- that I'm uber-qualified. I have no certifications, degrees, or qualifications of any sort. I am totally 733T! Thank god, I had almost started to believe the nay-sayers.
Oh, and you know how Einstein got bad grades in school? Yeah, well mine are even worse!
To paraphrase someone else:
"If you gotta' ask, you ain't never gonna' know"
Ads are broken.
I was going to reply to this, but I don't have my SCIWE (Slashdot certified insightful writing engineer) certification.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Do you also let the FBI pick up your garbage instead of the BFI?
Certification mills are the engine that keeps teh IT industry running! Think about it. Five years ago when the dot com economy was in full swing, you couldn't turn on a tv or read a newspaper with out seeing ads for some place that would give you some kind of certification in the IT world. Well, where are they now? The economy tanked, and the education mills dried up. If we don't get unqualified people back into the IT industry, it could be years before we see a significent change in the US marketplace. Don't even wonder why jobs are being outsourced overseas. They have the unskilled yet certified labor to fill those positions!
Where do you see yourself in five years?
Well, let's see, it's 11 A.M. I guess that means I'd be getting out of the shower to refill my beer mug.
KFG
it's not that i don't know how to use the shift key; it's that i reserve it for Very Important Matters. big on the jitterbug, as well as its perfume, from one old hippie to another.
MCSE Certification
I completely agree. People skills are much more important than lousy certifications...
-Ralph Bonnell - CISSP, LPIC-2, CCSI, CCSE+, CCNA, RSA/CSE, CSFE, eSCE, PCIA, ACIA, STAR, MIPS-I, MIPS-E, SCP, BSPE, SSE, MCSE 2000 - http://ralph.cx/resume/
Cybie! aka Ralph Bonnell
I keep my A+ certification card in my wallet. Sometimes when I visit a user's desk, I hold my wallet up next to my face, exposing the card, and say in an Agent Mulder deadpan voice "A+ certified technican. I'd like to ask you a few questions about your operating system."
MCSE:Security... I was trying to come up with a punch line for that, but it pretty much holds its own.
A racket scientist? Were you trying to get a job at SCO or MicroSoft?