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What's the Point of IT Certifications?
erica_ann asks: "Fact: You can have the knowledge without having to pay to be Certified when it
comes to computers. Another fact: Just because you have the certification does not mean you actually
know the material as well as someone who is not certified. You might just be good at taking tests.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?"
"I have had this conversation with many friends and co workers. One thing I like
out of all the conversations is getting more than just one point of view. I know
my standpoint on it. I
rambled on it for quite a while. But, what I would like to ask of everyone on Slashdot, is what is your opinion? Do you have certifications? Was it worth getting certified? How do employers, employees and management feel about them? Do you pay for them? Does the company pay for them? Is it worth being certified if you do not get a pay raise for it? What certifications bring more
than others? Are specialized more employable than general certifications?
I think many people would benefit from hearing more than one side of the controversy. Maybe it will encourage more employers to reward for certifications. Maybe it will help the next person attain the career he or she wants. Is there such thing as being TOO certified for a job?
Or is the whole idea of getting alphabet soup behind your name just certifiably insane?"
I think many people would benefit from hearing more than one side of the controversy. Maybe it will encourage more employers to reward for certifications. Maybe it will help the next person attain the career he or she wants. Is there such thing as being TOO certified for a job?
Or is the whole idea of getting alphabet soup behind your name just certifiably insane?"
Do not try to understand the point -- that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no point.
--
You didn't know.
Because the less the PHB's understand on your resume, the more qualified you must be.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
The point of certs is to put them on your resume, which gets you interviews.
That's all, really.
-Peter
Oh, I know the answer to this one! To impress HR and the PHBs.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
To get past the HR Trolls!
The only way to pass them is to point shiny Certifications into their beedy little eyes!
This
I used to be one of those few IT guys who had a completely unrelated degree (architecture). However I somehow managed to procure enough experience that I really didn't need all the certificates (MSCE A+ etc.) I also know of many others in the same boat. However if your lacking experience then certification is a good way to get people to take a chance on you.
Many employers look for certification as a way of reducing the field of applicants and reducing their search costs. It is far from prefect, but very commonly used.
... are definitely worthwhile. You're not getting them to get a job working for someone who knows your job better than you. You're getting them so that someone who has NO IDEA how to do your job can hire you. There are lots and lots and lots and lots of such people in the world, and they have lots of money with which to pay you.
For the same reasons you have to go to college to get that stupid piece of paper.
The point of a cert is the same as a degree - it demonstrates to a complete stranger that one posesses a certain skillset and dedication. Certainly, we all know that genious who is a high school or college dropout but if you hadn't known this person for longer than a few minutes, just how do you go about figuring out if they have certain qualifications?
Yes - it is possible to do some quick testing in some cases. In other cases, certs are the only tool.
More
I don't believe in certifications. I've never needed them, and I've met too many paper MCSE's. My university degree is more than enough to get the point across, and only one time in my life have I ever been denied a job for not being an MCSE.
What's the point of getting a degree when you can Dropout
SO, I have been thinking about this for a while. I work in the Government contract IA and IS and there are a lot of highly paid people here with CISSPs and other certs who know a lot less than I do. SO, what is the point? It seems that the cert still holds a lot of weight around here, regardless of the knowledge to back it up. 2c
Fact: You can have the knowledge without having to pay to be Certified when it comes to computers.
This was exactly my situation before I learned (to my chagrin) that most employers simply won't take you seriously unless you throw the alphabet soup at them.
Another fact: Just because you have the certification does not mean you actually know the material as well as someone who is not certified.
Again, something I'm uncomfortably familiar with, having to work with more than one 'paper MCSE' in the past...
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
You got it. Unfortunately, that piece of paper is the only way non-technically-minded individuals have to gauge your technical prowes, so they tend to attach unreasonable worth to them.
This isn't a problem...it's an opportunity. "Turn the problem on its head...that's what the Bishop always said..." (apologies to Harry Harrison).
Most people in the IT field are good test takers...if you don't think of yourself as a good test taker, you probbly haven't worked hard enough at it. In a world where you will be judged all too often by your alphabet soup, test taking is a skill you must master. Myself, I've only studied for exams from books, rather than take expensive classes, commonly take about 20 minutes to finish a certification exam, and I haven't failed one yet. Am I that much of a genius? Heck no...I just test well, that's all.
To my mind, the key to testing well (as well as actually coming away with knowledge you can useon the job), is to actually understand the material, rather than simply know the answers by rote. When you can answer the practice questions without looking at the multiple choice answers, and understand why your answer is correct, you're ready.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
I've done just fine for friends/co-workers working on their pieces of crap with no initials after my name. I suppose if you're in a corporate setting, though, it would be a LOT different.
If the job requires cert and you know the stuff, might as well get resume fodder.
...and for the workflow software to flag, hence getting it forwarded to the hiring human being.
Aside from that, they may or may not be of value.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
..then you probably need it!
/.) that it's what gets you noticed.
:(
I'm not in the IT field per se and so I don't have any experience of certifications. But it seems to me (after reading a lot of rants and comments on
Now, if you are some IT superman, you probably will get noticed without it and this discussion is moot. But for the rest of us, I would think we'd just have to get a peice of paper which gets the foot in the door.
I fully agree with the submitter - a certification is no gaurantee of knowledge or skill and it sucks to have to get one because a job wants one or a promotion requires one
1. You will have a pointy haired boss. This person will be a "manager", and have little technical skill. He/She will not be able to actually evaluate your work at a technical level. He/She will use "industry standard" metrics to evaluate your performance. The fact that you have a $CERTIFICATE makes you a safe bet for them to hire, since they probably can't tell the difference between someone walking in off the street and lying their ass off, and a seasoned 10 year IT vet.
2. You will make roughly "industry standard" wage, since your boss will really have no idea what you may or may not be worth.
3. Your chances of getting promoted to management are close to nil. After all, you can't go promoting the people that do all the work. They're too hard to find!
4. Your shop will get dragged, kicking and screaming into new technologies, since these likely have no certifications, and therefore no way for management to evaluate their worth. Your positive opinion towards new technologies will be considered an attempt to fill your resume in a vain attempt at escape or promotion.
Get certified... Work for the clueless.
So what is the point of getting IT ertifications? To have a piece of paper
Many people think (with some justification) that the piece of paper will lead to a higher income.
That's all.
Since I'm in my own business, this doesn't apply, but if I were a mid-level manager and needed to hire an IT person, and I hire someone with certification I can truthfully say I checked his qualifications. If they screw up, well, it's not my fault because I checked on what I could. But if I hire someone without certification, and they screw up, I can't prove I did all I was supposed to.
At least that's how I hear it from friends. Personally, I'd rather throw out oddball questions that most people won't expect from a manager and see if they actually know how to do what they claim they can -- or can at least think through the process. I'd rather have a competent tech or programmer than a certified one, but if you're not a the top, it can be different. Then it's better to prove you checked credentials and certifications than that the person actually be able to do the job.
Well I can sum it up in a comparison to the college deplomas. I work with a guy that runs an Ebay outlet for the company. He is well paid and got hired at a larger salery because he had a BS, however the BS degree is in English lititure. I have only a HS deploma and MANY years experiance I am often hired in at the same wages as a high school deploma earns. It seems that the pay is based on how much training (regardless if it fits the field or not) you have recieved.
I'm told you are what you eat, does that mean I can be you by tomorrow with some A1?
Most of the time I'd say that people going for certifications are already fairly familiar with whatever software/hardware they want certified for.
It may sound stupid, but the reason you pay to take a test to get a piece of paper stating that you know something is to have an organization backing your claims of expertise up.
It's the same as every other qualification, it's just for the piece of paper. (But some are not worth the paper they are written on :cough: MCSE :cough:)
Certifications are things that stupid people get because stupid companies require you to have them before they hire you or give you certain responsibilities. Smart people don't get stupid certifications or work for stupid companies. About the only thing they are good for is resume filler.
A good idea is to get one or two of the better certs and stick them on the resume. If an employer seems really interested in them then don't work there!
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Got a couple of certis - from my own experience, I learn only those things that interest me, leading to holes in my education. The certi course of study will cover material you may not otherwise have learned. Other than that...
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Espectilly in government where people are repremanded for their failure vs. corprate which rewards for their success. If you hire a person who is certified and he does a crappy job you can say but he was a certified professional. Vs. if they hired someone without the certifications and he did a crappy job, then the hirer would be in a load of trouble for hiring somone without proof of their credentials. If they harded somone who was not certified and he did a good job for many years but that one project that he messed up on many people in government will use that to get rid of the person who hired them. A certification doesn't say I know what I am dooing but it says you will not get in trouble if you hire me and I don't know what I am dooing.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When you're hiring, you have very little to go on when it comes to judging attitued, aptitude, knowledge and skills.
Certification should be considered as a contribution to the knowledge part, but not much more than that. Even when it comes to knowledge it should be suggestive and not deterministic.
Problem is, lots of people with lower skills, knowledge and aptitude than those required by a position are the ones doing the hiring, and so take these certification as an indicator of all 4 characteristics I mentioned earlier, instead of just 1.
If you're a manager doing the hiring, please note that certification is not that very different from any other seminar when it comes to judging how good an employee will be.
If you're the one looking to get hired, please note that most managers won't pay attention to my previous paragraph and so certification will probably help you find a job.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Employers ask for resumes for a reason, they want to see what you know. They can't see how much you know from a 30 minute interview, so they want to look at your resume. Of course, if you know more, they'll realise that while you're working for them and promote you, or, conversely, realise you don't know anything and fire you. I just hope they knew the difference between useful and useless degrees (like the ECDL).
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I love having lots of certifications. It shows how smart you are. Plus, it just looks cool having all those letters after your name.
-Killmenow, CCNA, CNE, MCSE, RHCE
PS. Really, I let them ALL expire. They were neat to obtain but serve almost no practical purpose. They are mostly there for HR types, PHBs who wouldn't know talent from a hole in the ground, and vendors to bilk you out of more and more money keeping you on the re-cert treadmill.
Will I get a raise if i pass the RHCE, CCNE, MCSE etc etc. simple answer..... NO! So I have to agree there is no point. I have been a systems admin/engineer for about 13 years. I have NEVER taken a cert test. They just strike me as a waste of money and time. My managers have mostly always agreed.
Yes, I agree that to those who know what they are doing, the certifications do not necessarily mean anything unless you're talking about top tier cert's like cisco's CCIE. However, I have yet to know of a large company's HR department that does not use ceritications to rule out potential applicants. A similar resume that both people have 5 years of experience and a bachelor's degree, but one person has a CCNP and a couple other cert's, they will sometimes throw out the person without a cert depending on their departmental regulations, and other times they will simply put the person with the cert's on top of the pile, so the hiring supervisor may not get to the person without a cert, even if it turns out that they are better qualified.
Personally, my company pays for $2000 of technical training per employee per year. We can choose to use that money towards a class, or towards taking tests, etc. They don't pay if we fail. We also do not typically get raises because of it, but when promotions do come around, it does make you look better as compared to your coworkers. Also, it is something to fall back on if you do get fired or quit from your current job. There is no downside to getting a certification unless you are legitimately broke and your employer does not pay. I see no reason for the general masses to not get a certification as the pointy hairs generally look at it and think you're a god.
Most IT managers are dimwitted when it comes to qualifications. Keep in mind that HR recruiters, who are usually even more retarded than IT managers, screen resumes before the IT manager sees them. Certs are a good way to back up what your resume says and get yourself into the 'to be interviewed' pile.
I just left a site where the guy with the most certs was probably the worst technical person in a team of ~10. I wouldnt trust him to swap tapes in the library, nevermind have root...
Certifications are designed to act as a coarse filter for skill sets. Specifically, having a certification for skill set X does not imply that you are proficient in skill set X, but it's a good first approximation.
It's not a perfect standard, but it's all we've got. What are the alternatives? "Job experience" on a resume isn't a good one; in a world where PHBs don't understand the technology that their developers are working on, generating "job experience" for a resume is as easy as passing a certification exam.
Students with the 4.0GPAs with CS degrees might come out of school and not know jack about shit, while the self-taught guy with a 2.8 in Liberal Arts might code rings around the former. That's a fact.
I am in the process of getting certified and I would relish the opportunity to go back to school and get a CS degree. But the cert is a notch on my resume and a clear win in the short term. Once I'm in the door I know I can do well.
It's all about getting the toe in the door. Get the "piece of paper".
At least somebody passing a certifiation knows something about the subject. (Braindumps notwithstanding, but no everyone cheats)
We have people here with Bachelor's Degrees that don't know squat about IT, but got their job soley because of that aptly named BS.
True, some people may very knowledgable w/o a Cert, but the chances are that those with them know the technology fairly well, while the risk increases (from a hiring HR standpoint) without them.
I'd much rather see somebody with aN IT Cert than a BS in mathematics apply for a job in my Network Services unit, yet unfortunately, the guy with the Math BS is more likely to get the position and have to be taught everything from the ground up.
Besides, if you really know your stuff, why not take the test(s) ? What's to lose ?
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
People who hire you will not believe you when you say that you posess a certain level of knowledge unless you have a cert to prove it.
It's all a matter of CYOA, and HR people have been doing it for years. Trust is not something large corporations take to the bank, and for good reason.
That said, Certs are over-rated. People can memorize, cheat, or simply lie about having the cert. Memorizing the info for passing a cert actually makes you LESS effective because you can't apply that knowledge, plus it doesn't account for the beauty of hacks and workarounds, which most coders are cheered for, whenever they get the little praise they do.
I'd rather have a cert than not, because it decorates my resume nicely.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
...was a good exercise for me. It made me dig into all sorts of nooks and crannies of Java that I don't usually work with - unsigned right shifts and nested inner class scoping issues and all that kind of thing.
I've probably forgotten most of that stuff, but I thought it was worthwhile to have studied up on it once.
The Army reading list
Certifications do serve a purpose (other than to push a vendors technology).
If I had two identical candidates (experience, personality) one who is certified and one who isn't, I would hire the certified person. It shows a commitment and desire to learn.
The Biggest problem is that people think certification is a replacement for experience, which it definitely is not.
It really doesn't matter what You think about certifications.
1 627386,00.asp
What matters is that HR departments use them as a filter to keep out the great unwashed from jobs.
You can have been the guy who said to Linus, "Hey, have you looked at Minix? Pretty cool, huh?" Or, have actually written the program that the company someone to run, but without the right letters on your resume, you're not going to land the job.
I talk some more about it, and Linux, here:
http://www.thechannelinsider.com/article2/0,1895,
The bottom line: certification and networking (and I'm not talking TCP/IP) are two of the best ways to get an IT job.
Steven
Validated experience on a resume is better.
Certification with experience is best.
Bottom line is... if you have the experience and can pass the exams, why not do it to cover all bases. If you know the stuff, it should be easy for you.
Not unlike the benefit of any schooling - the boss knows that you have at least had some basics covered.
See title...
I found the classes for my certification to be decent training about half the time. The best reason to get certs in my opinion is the largish pay increases and the oppotunities for advancement that are usually tied in with them.
I think there is very little point in this certification because everyone taking it seems to cheat (the tests are the same for everyone - surprise surprise the answers are all over the net)
Most heavily certified techs I've met have read the books, and taken the tests without any practical knowledge... They are surrounded by papers with their names Embossed between either a Microsoft or A+ Logo, and usually can't troubleshoot their way out of a paper bag. When hiring I pay no attention to certifications, but ask open-ended questions that give me insight to how the applicant would react... I never knew that the certification process spent so much time covering System Restore and System Recoveries....
If you want to work for a non-tech company, certifications become more important.
Like any grading system, they allow a potential employer to assess baseline knowldege, whether or not they themselves have that knowledge.
If you want to work for a large company, or a tech company, they shrink in value -- as the knowledge they pertain to becomes verifiable by the employer directly.
Ex. My sister does tech recruiting for a large supermarket chain; they ignore certifications, as they have the wherewithal to test candidates' knowledge according to their own standards.
Furthermore, they have a very large IT section; jobs are specialized enough that the knowledge set specific to these jobs are more important that the knowledge sets specific to most certifications.
That said, it can't hurt your career to have a certification -- the question is, is it worth paying for.
I am guessing here, but it seems to me that the more glutted with workers the market is, the more important certifications become. If I have 400 resumes for one open position, it is an easy way to weed out a lot of those resumes.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
All the certifications are going to do is get you and interview, and that is what they are there for. Once you get in front of someone who knows what the hell they are talking about, your pieces of paper are as good as toliet paper. If you are interviewing with someone who knows what they are doing, and you can't display the knowledge those certs say you have, you're not getting hired.
The other side of this is that certifications will get you a job at the higher levels where you will only be interviewed by upper management types and HR. None of them are going to know a thing about what you do, they just want the computer-thingies to run. So, the more letters the better, and it also helps to be a good salesman at that point.
Really, it comes down to the job you are after. If you are going to be part of an IT staff, a few certs might get you in the door, but it's your knowledge which will get you the job. If you are going for a high level job where you aren't going to face a knowledgable interviewer, go for the alphabet soup.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
In a past life, I worked for a consulting firm working its way up the Microsoft foodchain. The more certs we had, the higher ranked the firm was, which meant MS would give us jucier leads and better discounts. So we were encouraged to seek them out.
In conclusion, certs can be a nice icing for the business side who has no idea what you do, but make your employer pay. let me repeat do not pay for training, study guides, exam, or take unpaid time-off to study
Technology Consulting & Free Downloads
I would caution against too-specialized advanced degrees (yes, Museum Training in Anthropology really exists) and certifications when you're not sure what you want to do, because the employer will think this is your specific field of interest and not think as broadly about where he can apply your skills.
The people who look at resumes initially are non-technical and buzz word lookers. For these people certificates on your resume means you have done a great deal of work. So it helps you pass that initial sorting of resumes.
To do the real work, you need real experience.
That's the only real reason to get a cert. To get a job where either HR or the PHB has decided that you need the cert to get hired.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Sometimes it's great to do something 'cause you can, to show that you can. It's like a merit badge. You don't get anything other than saying you have yet another qualification.
Hiring someone solely on certs is like hiring someone solely on any atomic thing. A good resume will list many accomplishments, through work, school and certifications. And it doesn't have to be a complete mix either.
But for non starter stuff, a cert and one job experience, or a few certs, is good for an entry level job though not for mid-level.
....about my college course. I shall quote it:
"Industry certifications provide potential employers with an objective gauge of an applicant's level of expertise. For this reason, the CETY program prepares graduates to challenge industry certifications including Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA), Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA), Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP), and components of the Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE 2000) and Cisco Certified Security Professional (CCSP).
The CETY program will appeal both to students with no prior knowledge of networking and those with a foundation/knowledge in this area. "
Nowhere in there does it say you walk out with these certs. So let me get this straight, Im paying 3k+ a year to take a course I could take online but I dont get a shiny college diploma so Im not accepted in society if I dont? Hoo-rah. Fun times for me. Funnyer still is I have a job right now at an ISP that is what I'd be doing when I'm done the course. This makes sence how?
My Opinion (oversimplified):
Certification is for those who need to be told they're smart because they don't beleive it themselves
My department's opinion:
Get certified and we'll give you a one time bonus, plus *some* reimbursment of expenses. This way our sales guys can buy contracts with "we have this many MCSE, we have that many CCNA and overall we have all these certifications ready and waiting to support you.
more certs == more contracts == more income == bigger bonuses and pay raises.
So although I don't personally think it's that benefitial, I can see how overall your employer wants you certified.
I have 5 major certifications and can tell you they dont help with the day to day work except for what you have learned from the process.
What it does help with is getting your foot in the door with managers, it helps your resume and it makes you dig deeper the subject than you normally would go.
Well, the same could be said of any type of degree, couldn't it?
From my experience the folks that don't have the certs know x times more than the folks with certs. I interviewed a few people that had certs and a few that didn't .. I hired the Ones that didn't have the certs because they were able to pass my basic knowledge exam.. Am i the only one that rigeriously tests the applicants?
I have no college degree of any kind (for that matter, I don't have a HS diploma either, just a GED). In 1998 I got my MCSE and the space of about 2 months doubled my pay. It was definately worth it for me as it took me to the "next level". Much like college, it "got me in the door".
As always, YMMV.
Politics, Culture, Food?
Certifications are worthwhile, but only if your employer is will to pay for them, and the materials needed to get them. I've gotten several certifications, because it rounds out my knowledge in the specific area I've worked in, where I've delved quite deep, but know little in associated areas. Certifications allow you to develop the areas where you haven't had any experience, and ultimately improves your understanding across the board.
Plus, those that whine about not having them, probably can't pass the tests.
I've asked people what the point is of certification or even a college degree in IT if the people holding the paper don't necessarily know what the hell they are doing. If you ask me, it seems that most PHBs are PSE educated and have an innate need to justify the thousands of dollars and valuable years spent at college or tech school. Therefore, they only hire others who hold equally useless pieces of paper.
;-)
Am I bitter? Nah.
It would seem to me that professional references should stand above all when it comes to hiring for IT. The best judgments of a techie are the results he produces, not the acronyms behind his name.
I am MuchTall
to be able to easily identify those people who have the kind of experience and training an employer would need.
The fact that they don't work that way isn't a failure of certifications, it's a failure of schools that turn out credentialed graduates without proper training, and a failure of people in hiring to hold those schools accountable by not hiring their graduates.
Certifications, when done correctly make sense.
I agree about the last statement. As part of a class I was taking in high school, we took the A+ certification, and CompTIA (the company behind it) screwed up my name, and treated me like NStar (an abysmal power company) does when I tried to fix it: poorly written demands for additional verification that I couldn't provide ("please fax a copy of your driver's license" but I had neither a driver's license nor a fax machine) and not even sending me the certification with the right name on it (that would cost me another $15, so I didn't bother).
Now, for a high school student, I think that the certification makes sense, because most people will just disregard any teenager as uneducated and inexperienced. The inexperience is, of course, still an issue, but with a certification, a teenager can prove that he's actually got the know-how to do the job, and there's a lot less of a risk in hiring him.
I have an A+ certification-- I'm only in high school. But when I offer computer repair/custom building services, people often will respond first with a straight up "no thanks," then if I add that I've got this certification they'll think about it again for a second. Maybe this kid knows what he's doing?
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
This is a stupid way to think. Having a Cert doesn't make a candidate any worse than having a Cert makes them good.
A Cert, if nothing else, tells you the person WANTS to be in IT.
This
The odds that someone with a certificate knows what the heck he is talking about is much higher than someone without a certificate who claims he knows what he's talking about.
Translation of the original submission:
I don't have a certification, but I think I know everything and am too much of a cheapskate to pay for certification, but want an employer to pay me what he would someone who was willing to go the extra mile and prove he knew what he was talking about by getting certified.
You can tell the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
My company wants their employees to have certifications for bidding on contracts. I don't mind - they pay for it and it could be a personal benefit some day.
Good certifications require more than simply passing a multiple-choice test. For example, Cisco CCIEs must pass timed lab tests requiring specific goals be accomplished.
Good certifications also require continuing education to stay certified. Other certifications, security ones in particular, require someone (already certified) to sponsor you.
Unfortunately, there are very few *good* certifications.
It's nice to know any query about the business world can now be answered in one or two sentences peppered with marketing buzzwords and/or abbreviations. I don't blame you - it's a generalized problem of oversimplification stemming from the proactive approach of CEOs and DHRs everywhere.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Having a lot of certifications will get you passed over during the interview process. I live in Maine which is not a giant tech state. People see those on your resume and assume they cannot afford you. Also I've never got a job that didn't come about by knowing someone on the inside. My first job I got after being a temp for two months. They liked me and hired me. The second job, an old teacher of mine (UNIX/Solaris) is one of the head UNIX Admins and I'm sure that didn't hurt me at all.
...implies that you don't have any certs.
They're a way for people who don't have IT skills to evaluate the abilities of an IT person. As an analogy, say I'm terrible at math. If I see someone has a Ph.D. in Mathematics, I can be fairly confident that the person is at least competent in math.
Are certs perfect? Hell no. As mentioned in the article, it is possible to be supremely skilled and have no certs. It is also possible to have certs and be an empty suit (we all know this guy). But certs, for better or worse, are often the only game in town and you should learn to play it.
For much the same reason you get a degree; to get your foot in the door when you're looking for a job.
A certification won't guarantee you a spot in the company, but it DOES increase your chances.
Take my workplace for example. We're a large company and a relatively large division of that company. When a job is posted as available, incoming resumes and applications go first through Human Resources. Now, every application gets "vetted" by the HR people, and quite frankly they know next to nothing about what constitutes a good IT guy.
Now, when the resume or application has "run the gauntlet" then we'll get to see them. That's when we can choose our candidates.
The problem with this? Well, at some point the HR people decided that industry certifications were a requirement for this job. Apparently they don't listen when we say otherwise. As a result the certification at least gets your resume in front of the manager, but does not necessarily get you hired.
FYI, once the resume hits us, we pretty much ignore the certifications part and look at the meat (work experience and so forth). To my mind, good work experience is much better than certifications.
Having said that, there are ways to shortcut this system, but they're rare and usually involve a reference from an employee already working there.
So, it depends on the type of company you want to work with. Small companies typically don't care too much about certs. Consulting companies usually require them. Big companies don't really care, but you're not going to even get their attention unless you have at least one certification at the top of your resume.
Honestly though, for the cost of most certs these days you may as well just get one. Hell, if you self-study you can get an MCP with a single test (about $100)... that at least gets your "in".
I have never gotten any certification, nor has any employer seriously asked me for one It doesn't matter if you have certifications when you can legitimately claim that you have worked >5 years in that particular field. But in case of a candidate who is entry level or has less than 4 yrs of experience these certifications are a way to get you the interview. There are many young graduates who are probably equally qualified for that position. Those certifications are the ones which get you noticed. That was at least my experience.
Next!
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I've met MCSEs whose only experience is taking classes on getting their MCSE, and they could not rename a PC. They have no other experience other than learning to take the MCSE.
I think a BA/BS and certs are they way to go. The bachelors teaches one skills needed to work with people, logical reasoning, the ability to write clearly, and other skills needed for human interaction on an intelligent level. A bachelors degree teaches good, all-around skills in a relatively short period of time. If employers are also smart, they'll only hire from above a certain GPA (3.25).
BUT WAIT -- I know you don't need to go to college to be able to do that, but so many IT people I know and work with have no social skills. I've risen to a high level manager (and I still get to work in the trenches sometimes) because I have social skills, and my coworkers didn't/don't.
The certs help in honing the IT skills -- and in making it easier for employers to be more certain that I understand what I'm doing. I've also found I learn things in cert classes -- but boot camps are not the way to go for truely learning the skills. They're great as a starting place sometimes.
I say you need a combo of college degree and certs.
So who would want to hire them anyway. I, have a degree in Computer Science and I'm currently currently working on my Masters. I have a love for this work and this industry.
Most people who seek certifications are only in it for the money. And most of the people I've worked with or who have worked under me who have only had certs have been somewhat clueless.
I'm sure I'm going to get flamed... so have at it. The truth hurts.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Getting a degree might not mean you know anything, but it can demonstrate that you're dedicated and dependable, which are important qualifications in the work place. A certification is typically a lot easier to get, so they don't hold the same weight, but that makes them a good way of showing potential employers that you're staying current with changing technologies.
Obviously there are other methods of demonstrating your worth to a potential employer, certs are just part of the 'ol resume toolkit.
A steaming cup of soykaf would be real wiz right now.
Well for me, the certifications I earned helped me get my foot in the door into the IT world. While I have on the job experience that is worth much more than those shiny pieces of paper, it was near impossible to convince HR managers that my lack of certifications did not represent my actual skillset. Earning those certifications got me past the gatekeepers, and I suspect the same is true for many slashdotters.
Despite the fact that I have a BS in Computer Science from a top ranked school, I've been turned down for several jobs due to the lack of "Certification." In one instance I was told that I was underqualified due to the lack of "A+ Certification." Somehow my CS degree just didn't prepare me for installing drivers and such.
The way I see it, I probably didn't want those jobs anyway. It comes from ignorance on the part of management. There are still many CIOs that don't really understand IT and certifications are a bit of a security blanket for them. These people also tend to hire individuals with a business management background as their managers rather than IT people (they tend to think of IT people as managerial challenged). In then end I don't want to work under management that has no IT experience, so it's usually just a good indication to move on. Unfortunately this still seems very common, especially for medium sized business and large non-technology corporations.
I guess if that's the type of job you want, then get certifications. Otherwise, just take classes and let your work/knowledge speak for itself. A competent manager should know whether or not the person they're talking to is qualified (and should also know how to write a decent HR request).
Whuzzizhace happened to overhear my suggestion and rather than a) answer the question or b) respond with a simple "I dunno... that's not part of the training" he flew into a massive zitface rant about how I thought I was so smart and I needed to show respect for his credentials and respect how hard he worked to get his ticket and stormed off.
Tickets are needed to convince hiring managers - most of whom have no technical skills - that you know what you are talking about. They don't know the difference between a good tech and a bad one so they rely on certifications they know nothing about.
Understandable... would you trust a guy claiming to be the best gynecologist in the world if he didn't have a medical degree?
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
See, this is one comment I've never really understood. Yes, there are lots of clueless certification monkeys out there. No, in most cases, certifications say absolutely nothing useful. But prejudice against those who may have gotten them for other reasons?
For instance, I am a MCP. I'm not particularly proud of it, being a Unix person, but work paid for it. Yeah, it's a Windows job; I'm living in a place with a weak Unix market and can't move for a couple years, and I choose to be able to pay rent. But I am a MCP, and I do put that on my resume... at the bottom, under "certifications/awards/professional organizations", in the same place I put my ACM membership and my black belt.
So why would that matter to you? Seriously. I'm curious.
They are useful if you are out of high school, or have an unrelated college degree (e.g. history) with no experience.
;)
All that they do, as someone previously stated, is get you to the interview process. After that point, it doesn't make a difference...unless you want to hang them on your cubical wall, and have your fellow employees laugh about you hanging them up
If you have a computer related college degree, or substantial experience (note: "I have been running Linux at home for five years" does not qualify), they will get you the interview, instead. Thus, making the certs nothing but wallpaper.
I remember hearing that was an acronym for Must Consult Someone Experienced. Cheers
I honestly see nothing wrong with having certifications. Yes there are people who are good at passing tests but have no real experience, but that type of scenario should be weeded out during the interview process. I know when we look at people that have lets say a CISSP or a CCNA we ask them questions not only about the subjects they are certified in, but also go further to ask them other specific questions to determine their knowledge level. Having Certs can get you in the door for an interview, but having no knowledge usually to back up those certs is an easy Thanks for coming but not interested in the end. On the flip side those who have certs and are knowledgable become highly marketable. I have found that having many years experience and some certs like the CISSP has helped me out enormously in the IT realm. If you really feel jilted because you are uber experienced and dont have a cert then go out and get one. If you are smart on a subject then the path to certification in your area of expertise should be fairly easy...
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I was in a job doing some phone support, some PHP and some MySQL coding. I took a course in Java and got a certification in it.
In this case the certification replaced experience. I couldn't say to a new employer, "I have x years in Java" because my current job didn't have any Java work to do. The certification (from Sun) said I could do something the same as someone who may have more years of experience.
... although HP has changed it slightly now, to get the advanced certification labeled 'Certified Systems Engineer', I took a two-day, hands-on lab building clusters and troubleshooting proctor induced issues, with no feedback until the end of the two days.
If you passed that test, my employer (and their clients) knew you were competent.
Now, HP has split it into a regular type test and a simulation lab. That pisses me off, as that seems easier to pass... making my certification mean less...
What truth?
There are FOUR lights
As other people have mentioned, the big deal is getting that magic piece of paper to get your foot in the door. You won't pass most HR filters without a cert or degree. If you happen to be in a technology savy area, with lots of other tech types looking for a job, having a buzz-word (buzz-letter?) filled resume is going to get you to the point that an HR person actually reads your resume.
If you're already in the job, getting a certification is a decent way to fulfill some training requirement. And if you're the first one in your company to get a specific certification in your company, you might open some business doors for 'em. Thankfully, most of the companies I've worked for appreciate that monetarily...
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
They want to be able to point to a standards body when a hiring decision turns out to be a bad one. If you come in and tell them you're a whiz at Foo, and it turns out you're lying, then HR can say "Well, he fooled the Certification Board as well, so it wasn't just us."
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Certifications are just paper and don't guarantee any knowledge or skill.
College degrees are just paper and don't guarantee any knowledge or skill.
The trouble is that experience on a resume is just paper too, and doesn't guarantee any knowledge of skill either.
If you're hiring, how do you tell the difference between paper knowledge/skill and real knowledge/skill?
Until everyone's completely honest (and probably after too) hiring will always be a lot of guess-and-check.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
It is a dual-edged sword and there may be other issues, depending on the cert.
At work - in order to point out the fallicy of certs, I put on my signature, NMCAA. That stands for No Microsoft Certification At All. It comes becaue I often know more about the systems than those who posess the coveted MCSE or MCSD.
However, I make a point to distinguish between theese chop-shop certs and those like the Cisco CCIE, which requires a two day (if I recall correctly) onsite test after doing the paper tests
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
One, a lot of the time the people interviewing you and setting your salary are not as technically savy as you are. A certification is tangible stuff they can grasp onto. They also can justify lets saying paying Mr. Cert Guy 20K more a year than Mr. NoCert Guy. That is the common arguement for getting certs.
.NET with no experiance he may missed built in application configuration files or the built in tracing objects. But, the newbie programmer that has a Cert in .NET will for sure know about them. I would of come up with a better example, but I am a newbee .NET developer going for my MCSD.
Two, the less common arguement is this. Going through getting a cert forces you to get a broad understanding of a subject area. To have in your mind things that you won't necessarily get from on the job experiance. For example if a C programmer got thrown into developing
Overall, I think Certs are a good thing. I work with around 12 other programmers and I am willing to bet that in the last 3 years, less than 3 techical books have been read by all of them (probably none, not including manuals read at work of course, and excluding me(I have averaged at least 3 a year in the last 3 years)). Certs, at least show that a programmer has picked up a book and read something about their field.
Fact: You can have more medical knowledge without having to pay to be certified as a medical doctor, especially if you are really good at Google. And just because you have a medical degree does not mean you actually know the material as well as someone who is not certified (and is really good at Google). For example, you might just be good at taking tests. So what is the point in going to a board certified surgeon? Just to put your care into the hands of someone whose has a silly piece of paper?
The bottom line is that IT and software development is a profession and that includes knowledge acquisition and demonstration of that proficiency.
Because he is insecure and has a little penis. Why else?
not Individuals.
Business Big Gripe was that Institutions of Higher Learning weren't teaching graduates what they needed to know, to be able to enter the workforce. Corps were left training college graduates what they needed to know to actually perform a specific job.
Certification answered with a dual benefit of guaging academic preparedness. Higher education found itself in the service of the community in which it resided rather than the service of the student. Universities turned out graduates Industry wanted; hence job placement after graduation. Why educate a student without the guarantee of a job after he leaves the institution?
Oh, please. Certifications, degrees, etc., are all shorthand to give a potential employer some degree of certainty as to the competence of the employee. Are they a sure thing? Certainly not, but it's yet another data point to use.
Yes, you may in fact be a total savant of whatever computing technology. Let's say that your self-assesment is entirely correct. (Because, as we know, IT nerds have superb capacities for honest self-assessment.) The point is that other people don't know that! The questioner seems not to understand why he can't walk into an HR office, proclaim his leetness and be immediately offered a job.
* My theory is that because computers are fully controllable in a way that most things in life aren't, computer people think that everything in the world should be equally predictable.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
For anything more advanced or core to the company; I'd expect giving a candidate a much more detailed interview; and expect that they either got their skills on the way to getting a real degree or on relevant work experience. Certs mean nothing (actually, are a slight negative) for those positions.
Consider this...you don't have a degree in CS or any related field. You take a couple of classes to pass a cert and now suddenly people are responding to your resume on Dice. So now that $200 four years ago to get your measly A+ got you in the door of a new job and out of one you completely detested. So that was my situation and I have no complaints. Now, as for today I have no desire to really pursue anything unless I think I really need not so much the paper itself but at least the baseline knowledge that comes with it.
Up until I read that one comment, I was thinking 'Hey this guy is right. What's the point of certs?'
And then you made yourself look like a fool in my eyes.
My spoon is too big.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
A piece of paper is still considered better than telling them you're great.
But I agree a certification shouldn't be worth too much if you have some really great work left behind you to show up. But with that competition for a guy with just a certification, doesn't employers pick the guy with some real work they can see and judge anyway? At least from my own experiences I've got that impression.
I can't really see the problem here...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Some employers require employees to have certifications for liability control. Certification classes are designed to make absolutely sure that a person knows a basic set of skills. It may not necessarily mean that the guy with the certificate is smarter or better than someone without one but at least shows that you know what you're talking about and not just a good talker. A lot of people can talk themselves up and do an excellent job of selling themselves but when it comes down to it they really don't know what they're talking about. A lot of times you just need to learn a few buzzwords and you're in. If you have a certification, the employer has one more warm fuzzy that you 1-know what you're talking about, and 2-are capable of learning the skills necessary for the job.
There was a time before Microskills, boot camps, etc. when certifications were hard and took skill and lots of studying time to acquire. When I was 16 I got my MCSE on NT4, it took me three tries to pass the IIS 4 exam. But it got my foot in the door for a helpdesk job making 30K. Since then my cert count has grown to 12 and I've been in the IT field since then. It got my foot in the door when I needed it to, that was the point of my certification. Today, it just looks good on a Resume. [ name here] CISSP, CCNA, CCDA, CNA, CCA, A+, Net+, Server+, I-Net+, MCSE, MCP+I, MCP, WGSE Looks better than [ name here ] .....
+5 funny and true
I think the most important advantage of having a certificate is that it shows that you have invested the time and effort needed to obtain it, and that you are at least good enough to get the certificate (even if you're "just good at taking tests", you still need to have some knowledge of the subject).
Also, a certificate can prove a certain amount of experience, without you having relevant working experience. This can solve the chicken-and-egg problem that you need a job to get the requested experience to get a job.
Finally, a certificate can tip the scales when your prospective employer has to decide between candidates.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Don't know about you, but I've had a bad record working with people hired mainly based on certifications. They did tend to know most of the terminology in the field, but could not apply it. I tend to be of the opinion that certifications are a great way to make money. Not for the certifications themselves, but in training people to pass them. Most of the courses seem geared to give students an 'inside track' on the tests.
I have never gotten any certification, nor has any employer seriously asked me for one.
You've never applied for a job that had a bachelors, associates or masters degree in the requirements?
That's what a degree is - a certification.
Certifications are entirely useful if they are configured properly. For example, lets assume that I am out of town with all of my geek friends and my wife's laptop breaks. She needs it fixed immediately. Who do I trust to fix it?
Right now, there really isn't a certification that I trust. I took the A+ and passed it in all of 20 minutes - it is a joke, although you do have to memorize some arcane knowledge (which doesn't prove useful in the real world). The MCDST is looking better, in this respect. But even this one doesn't throw a tech into a room full of parts (some of them non-functional) and ask him/her to build a product to specification (or repair an existing one).
When the certs require real-world knowledge, we'll have real-world use for them. In a pinch, however, if I were running a business, the cert is a good way of filtering out those who can't even pass a simple test. This Ask Slashdot should have read:
Dear Slashdot, I can't seem to pass the [insert any cert here] tests, why do we need them anyway?
More
... ya, it was during the dot.com bubble ;)
And I consider a certification a negative.
I not-so-secretly believe that people who are certified do so because they don't have the experience, and want to get into a technology without starting at the bottom. That's fine, but the original goal was to give some formal recognition to experience, not to replace experience.
I guess the importance of certification comes down to who short-lists the resumes, and who does the hiring. If it's an HR department, then it's important. If it's a technical person, then it's not (or might even be a negative, as in my case).
Certifications have higher hirabilty factors. So if you are equal on all respects with an other person with certification for a job, usually that person with certification will be called on. I dont have any certifications, my present employer dont care much about that either. But when hiring if he finds a person with cert and meets all his criteria he certainly will hire him than a person with no cert.
I will say this - the harder a cert is to get, the more it is worth. The CCIE still gets a lot of respect. When looking for a contractor I specify it just to save time. The first few times I tried to hire a network contractor I got "qualified" applicants who couldn't answer simple questions. So call me lazy, but just knowing someone has a CCIE (and verifying it) tells me a lot. And judging by the rates they command, I'd say it's worth it to them too.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
It's the same as what you get with an undergraduate degree. You're levelling the playing field with those who have it, and having a small advantage over those who don't. All things equal, an employer will always select a candidate with more "glitter" than one without. Let's say Bill and Bob are both equally qualified. Same number of years of experience, same skillsets. The only real difference is that Bill took the time to get some certifications. Employer ABC is evaluating both of them for a single position. I would say that 9 out of 10 times, purely based upon this fact, Bill will get the job. The bottom line is that if you have the time and money to get certs, go for it. At the very least it will level the playing field for you.
I saw a great post in a previous discussion that said basically, the certification itself isn't worth much.
That the certification process represents the fact that the person either had the knowledge or spent time training to achieve the certication.
okay could help that.. but on a serious note: certs are just a formality to get noticed. Interviews do the acid test if the person really knows the stuff the cert boasts of.
another problem is being able to differenciate between a fake and an authentic cert (assuming they dont verify the authenticity), coz I know in India it is possible to buy one.
Certification accomplishes a few things. First, it's a great way to get a resume through human resources. A lot of HR departments don't even read resumes. They just match buzzwords. If the job posting lists ASP.NET, MCSE, MCSD and Java, then you'd better have everyone of those somewhere on your resume. If you can't get hired, it doesn't matter too much what you know. Again, landing the first job is the hard part. A long resume with references speaks louder than anything. In general, a CS degree will also get you farther than a cert.
Second, it's something to tell your customers. A lot of folks don't know the first thing about contracting with an IT shop. That's where the sales department steps in and says, "We're an licensed Microsoft Soultions Provider." This is very similar to the HR scenario, it's a foot in the door with a customer. And of course, for the shop to get the Microsoft Certified Partner designation, the employees therein need to hold certain certifications.
There is finally, one last thing that it does: it forces you to at least learn the preferred Cisco or Microsoft or Sun way of doing things. In reality, that may or may not always be a good way of doing things, but it forces you to pick up that background. The one constant in the IT field is that if you're not continually learning something new, you better be a COBOL programmer.
Disclaimer: I almost have an MCSE, but quit taking the tests 5 years ago 'cuz I landed a job. The job didn't require it and I didn't feel it was worth the cost.
More often thant not, your superior (or possibly the person doing the hiring (eg HR)), will not understand the technology in question, and will like to see such things as certs.....
The point of IT certificates is that you can frame them and put them on the wall next to your desk, to remind yourself of the time and money you wasted getting the certificate, time that would have been better spent _earning_ money while gathering relevant job experience.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Years ago I started on getting certifications, but quickly realized I was only transferring my money to someone else. This point was sent home at a job interview where my prospective employer informed me I was to complete one NT certification a week (and on my own time, mind you). I asked what was the point of being certified if all it meant was I could pass the tests. He just gave me a "look". Thankfully, I didn't get the job. I ended up at a place where I was asked to demonstrate my skill at the interviews. It's been a great 7-1/2 years so far.
GIGOwiz
It all boils down to marketing. Vendors require them to sell their products, without them you can't be a "certified reseller" or some such. Employers pick the "lucky" ones to get certified in order to be resellers for the vendors. Without certifications, the resellers can't be resellers, and there goes their market.
I call shenanigans.
HR does not write the screening requirements for a job posting, I do. And I can guarantee you that I have never put "A Random certificate from a body that has no credibility" as a requirement, so that shoots your to be interviewed pile argument all to hell. Especially since step two of the screening process is discard all resumes with the letters MCSE on them
I call bullshit on you. Certificates are really helpful when you get your employment through headhunters. They love them some certificates. Having said that, I thought I knew it all, or enough of it all anyways, until I got myself into some cert courses. Low and behold, I learned a whole bunch of helpful stuff that I didn't know before the courses. Worth the money? Probably not but the certs I got definitly got me my present job. Nothing wrong with being qualified AND certified.
You'll have that sometimes...
If its a CISSP or CCIE, then yeah, it matters. SS7 and SANS are pretty good, too. Personally, I am praying for the day the IT pros have to take state licensing exams like architects, medical personnel, lawyers, engineers. You notice their industries are not being outsourced...wink, wink.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Not really. you write the requirements but having the requirements AND a bunch of certs can get that HR person to think "Hey, this one seems to have a few more qualifications, lets put them through". It would seem that that's what certs are for.
;-)
I have to agree though, anyone who thought an MSCE was a good idea probably needs weeding out
Silly rabbit
The certifications show you have drunk the support Kool-Aid and spent so many $$$ on support. This is a blatant element of Cisco and Microsoft certifications. If I was a PHB in an organization with significant Cisco and Microsoft monocultures, I could see it.
But I'm not. So certifications are useless to me.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Just my opinion, but any hiring manager that openly states a prejudice against candidates who show that they are continuing their education via certification in a field is not worth their salt as a hiring manager. Every resume should have education and experience listed on it and the certification process is a good example that people are willing to continue their education and better themselves through certifications. I am not saying that in every case people with certifications will be better than those without, but in the same respect people with degrees are not always better than those without as well? What you are seeing is someone who potentially may be a good candidate and has some specific areas of talent that can be looked at during the hiring process. I also am surprised that you have had no experience with any company willing to pay for a certification for you in what you know because I have had the exact opposite. It seems fairly commonplace now in our realm to have companies give financial aid for certification as it is beneficial for the employee and the company (especially beneficial in the contractor realm...) Not trying to be a troll, but I can't take someone seriously who frowns upon further education?
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
The only benefit I can see is to get past the Catbert gatekeepers who will only select the certified resumes tossed over the transom.
Since that's the worst way to get a new job anyway (Network Network Network), that's still probably of extremely limited value.
Now I had one potential employer who favored candidates for a Project Manager job who had Project Management Institute certification. I didn't get the job (thank the FSM), but the state unemployment office offered to pay for the class and test (about $3500, or eight times what I got in unemployment checks), so I did it. It was outside of my core knowledge, and it's been semi useful (although the class sucked).
Design for Use, not Construction!
Obviously, your article shows you feel you're being screwed by the current system. Before you lay the blame squarely at HR/Management feet, realize that you use certifications in your own life to filter out the crap you deal with. It's easier to trust some university to tell me this guy should be a doctor, then pick up enough domain knowledge to figure that out myself.
What I don't understand is that you recognize that a cert is just a filter, but you don't elaborate on your attempts (if any) to bypass it. If you've got the skills to work there, then you need to figure out how to get that across (get a recommendation by someone, talk directly to the people you'd be working with/for etc.). Lacking a certification just means you have to work a bit harder to get in the door. And frankly, if all they really care about is how many certs they have on staff - doesn't that send a warning signal to you that you might not want to work there?
Others have already mentioned it, but yes certs are useful for:
- getting past HR filters
- impressing bosses, or more importantly sometimes, giving your boss ammo to impress others higher up the food chain
- survivability? If the axe is threatening to come down, all other factors being relatively equal, who do you think will get hit: You with all your undocumented knowledge, or your buddy whom the company invested $5k in for an MCSE or whatever?
Yes, it's unfair and it sucks. Yes, we all know people who go drop $5k with Global Knowledge or someone like that, get locked in a room for 5 days in Dallas, and come out with an MCSE and a bunch of crib notes about MMC. It's the way of the business world, and not likely to change anytime soon, even if Redmond were to drop into the Pacific tomorrow. If anything this sort of thing will only get worse, as IT departments continue to become more integrated and ubiquitous into companies.
It's worth it to bite the bullet in this case.
Illegal? I can't tell from your email address if you are outside the US, but it certainly is not illegal in the US.
You can decide to not hire a person for any number of reasons. There are some laws preventing hiring discrimination based on race, gender, national origin, and the like.... but certification is certainly not on that list.
Having said that though, I agree with you that it is foolish to prejudice youself against someone with a certification. I personally would treat them as a non-issue.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
While I agree that someone without certifications can certainly be much more qualified than someone with them, I think that your prejudice against someone who has certs is just as strange as someone who has a prejudice for them.
Certifications don't really tell you anything other than the person was willing to perform rote memorization (in most cases that I've seen) for a particular vendor. That in itself doesn't seem to be inherently bad. Even a person who is highly skilled in his craft may decide to take advantage of an employer that is willing to pay for a cert. There are times when a vendor wants a partner to have a certain cert level within the company. So to me, if I volunteered to get a cert, I would at least mention it on my resume thinking it couldn't hurt.
I contract to the DOD, which means that some non-technical person 30 steps up decides if my company gets the contract based off of the worker's resume. Something on your resume that has Microsoft and Cisco in the title is easy for a contract officer to cross reference with the required duties of the contract.
By having 4 certs that I keep current I pull down 6 grand more than the person next to me who has a masters in comp sci.
With much less investment from me to boot.
The only time I've seen(where I work) that a degree pays more than multiple high level certs, is when that degree is an MBA with an info tech option.
I know a lot of people think certification falls along the same lines as having a college degree. I disagree. Many if not most certificates are easily obtained. I've attended classes where others in the class barely attended but instead used the "trip" to vacation in the locale. Others clearly got through the week of training on sheer stamina but came away none-the-wiser.
I suppose (as I've seen in some of these posts) I could claim I'd done my due diligence by ensuring my candidates/employees were certified and point my fingers at them, or the certification bodies if they turned out to be duds.
A better way I think is the old fashioned way -- an in depth interview along subject lines germaine to the position being considered. Where I worked we used random questions from a set of questions collectively gathered from our team -- these questions were representative of the technology we used, the situations we encountered, and plans for future work. The only time we ended up with an employee of no use to ourselves was when after our screening process our selection was overridden by a PHB who felt he knew better. He didn't.
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
I think this is a bad approach. If someone has a certification while it does not guarentee skill or knowledge in an area, it may well be exactly that. It is one thing for me to put "Networking" on a resume, but if I put CCNA that damned well means something. Granted, one time I had a guy whose resume said "Completed CCNA boot camp", and 3 questions later it was very apparent that he hadn't the slightest idea or understanding of the basics.
I would recommend certifications. A) They get you past the HR droid B) they give the interviewer areas to grill you on (and therefore you can expect to be grilled in those areas) and C) certifications can show the applicant has made effort to gain the knowledged needed. That last point is especially valid if you are lacking a degree.
No employer is willing to pay me to get a certification in something I already know
So...don't get certified in something you already know...find something you don't know and get certified in that. Your attitude here strikes me as complacent.
"It is sad to see a family torn apart by something as simple as a pack of wild dogs."
and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
A bit extreme, no? I hope I never run into someone as arrogant as you in the work field,.....
Sucks when people like you thumb their noses at things that are so damn trivial....
Might be true for you however you are just one shining light in the ever deepening darkness.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Each person with that kind of judgemental, elitist, narrow minded attitude makes me more likely to find a better place to work..
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Studying for a cert examine is a great excuse to play with areas of a technology that you may not use in your day to day job. Thus by working towards a cert will generally help you to uncover some interesting areas of technology that you may not be well versed in.
I recall a job interview I attended in 1999. The job itself was a pseudo-network-engineer position with heavy client interaction; I would have worked out of a co-location facility and managed equipment for a tiny list of clients. The position was quite junior. This particular job required an MCSE, which I possessed.
My interview was multi-stage, including a technical process. The questions they asked were laughable; "What is TCP/IP" and "What is DNS" and so forth. I pointed out that I was, in fact, an MCSE. They replied "We know - that's why we're asking."
Other people can't define how useful a certification will be for you. If you earn one with the expectation of gaining employment based on the certification alone, then you are probably not getting as much from it as you potentially could. Some people learn better having a well-defined objective such as passing a certification exam. And some certifications, like CCIE, are certainly not trivial and require signficant discipline and effort to obtain. Accordingly, they will provide a greater degree of recognition.
If you find certifications personally helpful in skill and career development, then go for it. Just don't walk in to a job interview expecting the piece of paper to talk for you. Point out that you earned it, and in what ways it has or hasn't helped your growth. If you are dealing with competent interviewers, they will recognize and value your focus on real-world skills.
I don't think I would want to work for a company which makes such sweeping generalizations.
I throw my certifications on a one-liner under my education and training. You know, something like:
I took the RHCE (one week fast-track course) as the company were paying, and it was a week off at their expense as far as I was concerned. I found it pretty easy to pass, but since it's a performance based exam (ie, you actually have to solve real problems with the machine in front of you, or configure things to spec to a pretty tight schedule) you do have to know your stuff to have any chance in passine. This is unlike most "certifications" where at most you need to simply parrot what you've been trained, or just tick boxes.
I can't say I actually learned anything during the course, (maybe had my memory refreshed though!) but I'd consider it at least an indication of a person's ability to configure a system, have some idea of the general system layout and how to troubleshoot common problems.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Sure, discriminate against the Irish and Scots.
Paddy McSean
I don't work in IT, but when people I work with have certain degrees/certificates, I can expect a certain number of skills and level of work from them. Without certification, the employee's skills may not be guaranteed, making it difficult for the employer to depend on that employee.
That said, certification doesn't necessarily mean better training. It just sets a standardization bar.
Well, please feel free not to apply for any of the positions I advertise for.
But do keep this in mind: I have seven senior level programmers and designers working for me. All of them have been with my firm for at least three years, and are consistently happy. I have a 100% telecommute force, and they all get paid 90th %ile for their market - even the on in Seattle, WA.
So, you can continue to get certifications, call me names, and whine on slashdot when you get treated like cattle as your jobs get shipped of to India, or you can start learning, show demonstrable skill, and get a good job.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
So, the answer to the original question, then, would be that having a certification helps avoid getting a job under a stupid boss.
I've gone 16 years in my career without ever getting or feeling the need for a cert, but I'm about to get the Java Programmer cert because 1) My boss offered to pay for it. 2) It will have a positive effect on my resume. 3) It will benefit both me and the company, insofar as the higher-ups will see it and say, "oh, he must really know what he's doing."
Two people apply for a position. Both claim to know what they are doing. Both have the same amount of real world experiance. One has a cert/degree one dosn't. Which one do you hire?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Just me wondering, when evaluating what people to interview, what qualifications would you look at?
The most obvious thing I can think of is experience. But that begs the question of how one gains experience.
I'm not going to completely disagree with you in general, because I come from the perspective that if I were hiring I would not want anyone without a CS degree (where certifications are pretty much irrelevant). And even then I would thoroughly test them, because bad students can get through.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I.T. Certification is just like getting a drivers license. As you have all probably noticed about 75% of people that have a license have no driving skills whatsoever! It is the Same for your MCSE, CISSP, CCNA, or whatever other certification of the moment that is hot. chances are they are certified but have no clue what to do when they get behind a keyboard.
I think you are simply oblivious to reality in large (> 100 people) companies. Again, the retarded IT manager passes the poorly drafted requirements to the *even more retarded* HR recruiter who then applies their own uber 'regex' to the stack of resumes to determine who gets interviewed.
If I gather correctly, you are an IT manager. If so, I forgive your retardedness...
The only point to have any certification, or degree for that matter, is because someone for whom you want to work either requires it or will give you preference over someone without. There...that was easy. Now, about Slashdot posting a question such as this, and not my question a few months ago asking the /. community for suggestive help in designing a Linux based handheld + store-&-forward via mobile GSM pico-cells as a mobile data collection tool for use by volunteer physicians traveling in very remote locations within Africa. Obviously someone whining about the value of certifications being a percieved one is considerably more important (yes...I am whining). My two cents, if you're so damned smart, take the test. What's a few hours out of your life to make yourself that much more marketable.
There basically isn't any point, at least if you're looking at chances of getting hired. It's much more important to have relevant working experience, something to show that proves that you can do what the company wants done.
And, most important at all, you have to get noticed by the company in the first place. The key here is networking: bring yourself and your skills to the attention of people in hiring positions, make friends with them, and you'll be one of the first people they ask for a new job.
It doesn't matter if you have any certificates, it doesn't even matter if you're really good at the work that they need done; if they know you and they like you, you'll get the job no matter how many other people are more qualified.
Most people I know got their carreers started because they either knew the person who was hiring, or they were recommended by a friend. I, myself, usually get offered jobs because of my website. Few of us have any relevant certificates.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
While we're at it, why not ask the same question about college degrees? Isn't it really the same issue?
I used to think they were pointless and that I know as much as anyone who has gotten there certs but employers are looking for certs as an attempt to minimize risk when hiring because most of the time they don't know or want to know enough to distinguish between someone who knows there stuff and someone who knows there stuff enough to bs through an interview.
It's all about revenue for the company administering the exam.
Unfortunately, not everyone gets to screen resumes on their own. In previous places, my team was only able to review resumes that had been through HR. It sucks, but there are many times where a resume must pass through the hands of the non-IT-aware HR person before it gets to the tru techies.
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
If the choice is between someone with certs and without, the person with his/her certs get the job.
But, yeah. Ask someone in Human Resources about their hiring practices and ask what they think about certifications.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
well said,....the parent poster was an arrogant prick who obviously isn't a real professional
I went the degree route. Never bothered with certifications because quite frankly I've been dealing with Windows, Novell, etc. for longer than I care to admit.
But certifications do act as an initial filter. I've noticed the lower paying entry level jobs either require them or will provide them upon start of employment.
Nothing funnier than one family gathering I was at. Both my sisters brought their then boyfriends to dinner. One of them was a paper MCSE and didn't know shit. The other sister bf and I had a really good time ribbing him about it.
Unfortunately the wanker is now my brother-in-law. He's still a wanker by the way.
As an uneducated (read: holds no degree) software developer I know how hard it is to get your resume to even be considered by a company. Prior to become certified in the languages I use I had to work very hard to even be considered for a job (forcing my way in to speak with managers and HR). Once I was able to list certification on my resume I all of a sudden found myself being contact on a regular bassis by recruiters and HR managers.
Certifications in and of themselves do not prove a developers ability (specially with the low scores required to be certified). On the other hand certification is a way for the self motivated (read: able to learn with out shelling out 10s of thousands of dollars to people who teach because they can not do) to show that they have atleast the basic skills and are capable of working under time constraints (most certs are timed).
Really wise companies would not rely on degree or certification, but would instead have an internal test to see if the person can work in their enviroment.
Trying to get a job at a new company and using a certification as your only asset is weak as the employer really has no idea what went into getting it. For all they know you took 2 days and studied a book but had no hands on training/experience in the relevant subject at all.
I think the real difference shows when you are already working at a company and start working on getting certified. It shows them that you are still interested enough in what you are doing to take personal time to keep learning.
I have worked with people that believe that work is where you do anything related to work so when they go home the only thing they care to do is play games. When it came time to do internal hiring/promotions they were not considered to be serious candidates.
Unfortunately for them they were the first considered when it came time to do layoffs.
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I've found that having a major in Psychology doesn't open a whole lot of doors for me (I'm a DBA and database developer). I've considered getting MCDBA or Oracle certifications in the past just to advance my career. While it doesn't guarantee that you know what you're doing, it does usually mean you have at least a familiarity with the material. In hiring I've never been impressed with someone who had a lot of certifications if they couldn't answer some basic questions about the actual application of that "knowledge". On top of that oftentimes there is an advantage to your employer. A while back I worked for a company which was trying to gain a certain level of partnership with Microsoft. You can become a partner by gaining enough points by having applications that make use of certain MS technologies and by having a certain number of staff with varying MS certifications. There was kind of an unspoken agreement that if we pursued our MS certifications we would probably share in the wealth once the company gained that partner status. Though when we did the actual count, the most competent developers, sysadmins and DBA's on staff didn't have any certifications. In fact, one MCSD who left the company shortly after that left so many bugs into the product that we were left chasing them down for about 6 months afterwards. My biggest fear of the points system was that we'd be hiring what we liked to call "paper MCXX's" just because they had certifications. People who studied for four days beforehand, passed the tests, but couldn't really do the work once they got into the trenches. Certifications are nice, but they're no substitute for experience and ability.
Kneel before Sig!
OF COURSE it is just a piece of paper. Just like all degrees.
How many complete morons do you know with a degree because mommy and daddy paid for it and they got in trouble if they didn't get good grades?
It's always just a piece of paper. It never means or proves anything as far as intelligence, experience, or common sense goes.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
Illegal? I think not. I don't toss resumes if they have certs, but it is not illegal to judge and reject resumes on their face. If I get a resume that comes across as arogant, I toss it. Is that illegal? No. Hell, I tossed a resume because someone listed their hobby as pinball. It just irated me that they would put that on their resume.
There are very few certs that are anything but a piece of paper (but some employers decide that they want them).
There are some very notable exceptions. CCIE for one - Cisco gives your company better discounts on network equipment the more CCIE's your company has. Also, CCIE exam is a real lab exam, with you having a real network in front of you and timer going and tasks to set it up various ways with an instructor staring over your shoulder.
Multiple-choice questionnaire certificates are not really worth it, unless, like in my case, the company for some reason values them enough to 1) pay for the certs 2) reward the employers for getting that cert.
So a CCNE, RedHat Cert these suck? I'd like to see you pass the RedHat. Maybe you can... I don't know... but I do know it's no joke of a cert.
And let me guess, you DO want a degree... in Comp Sci; right?
This
Not all certifications are woth the same
Well honestly, certs dumb. I'm not a fan about the way IT professionals are supposed demonstrate competence by their ability to memeorize things. Then again you gotta play the game and in the inerst of full disclosure, i'm about to get the CCNA done...
If religous zealots don't believe in Evolution, then why are they so worried about bird flu?
How often does a given certification, or even set of certifications, *exactly* cover the knowledge set needed for a given position? Rather than trust a resume', why not *test* your applicants to learn hor much of what they say they know, they actually know? This of course assumes that the employer knows what skill sets they need and how to test for same....
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
I'm not the OP, but I'll bite. Because having certificates tends to indicate you don't have experience and are trying to simply look good by passing off a piece of paper. Also, look around. The guy with no certification is typically the one who can do it all, the guy with the cert typically can barely turn on a computer.
I've had the unfortunate opportunity to work with people who got hired simply because they said that they could do the work. They couldn't. They also didn't learn quickly. Last time I was involved in hiring someone, the question I asked was "You need to get access to a linux server, but nobody knows the root password. How do you reset it?". He didn't know, and I gave him a web browser and told him to google it. He found the solution, tried it out, and we hired him.
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Funny, but true story:
/A+, N+, Server+, HTI+, Security+, Linux+, MCP, MCSE NT4, 2000, 2003, MCSA 2000, 2003, MCDST, CCNA, SCSA...
When I got out of college, I had a hard time finding full time employment. I did contracting work, six weeks here and four weeks there. Nothing permanent, but I could pay my bills.
I saw lots of job postings requiring an MCSE or CNA. So what the hell? I went and certified.
I have no doubt that my MCSE got my resume put in front of a lot more PHBs. I got fewer contracts, but the pay I got more than made up for it. Still nothing full time.
This went on for a couple years. I picked up a certification, got a better contract. I didn't WANT contract work, it's just that it was all I could get.
Here's the funny part: One day someone called, completely at random. She'd seen a three-year-old version of my resume from a resume service I had never heard of, and wanted to know if I would be interested in teaching IT certification courses.
When she found out that I had more certs than were on my resume, she offered to hire me full time, on the spot. That was it. Now I teach the useless crap I know to anyone with $1500 and 40 hours of free time.
OK, that's my funny certification story.
The truth is, certs work for and against you. PHBs and HR bimbos get impressed by credentials, but also balk at the salary credentials typically imply. Techies usually aren't impressed by your 'leet paper credentials; most of them have met a moron with the same pieces of paper.
Still, in my experience, I've found that certs relevant to a particular job usually put your resume in the upper part of the stack that Kandi Melonsmuggler, Queen of HR, will call back. And that's really about as much as you can hope for. If you have another way to get to the same place (degree from a well-regarded school, military service, boning Kandi), maybe you don't need the certs.
Also, be aware that it's possible to be overcertified, and that employers sometimes see that as a sign of overqualification.
The best thing I can suggest is, if you're going to get certified in something, stay away from generic certs and lean toward something modestly specific. Everyone and his brother has A+ and an MCSE.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The same set of facts are true of college degrees.
Many OEMs require their resellers to have a certain number of certified people on staff with specific certifications. The inten is that these people know how to answer thier customers' questions and don't have to bother the OEM with these questions. I have worked for distrubtors and resellers who bith havea certification librarty they need to maintain. In certain circumstances these certifications are designed more for this audience than they are for the professionals working the product in the field.
As an aside, anyone who idiotically denounces certifications has unrealist expectations of HR departments and even IT departments the world over. HR has not the expertise to ask the appropriate questions to determine if a potential new hire has the necessary skills and the IT departments don't have the time to ask the questions. Certifications answer a lot of these questions for the employer. Call it the entrance fee for getting an interview.
There is a huge point if you consider how candidates are screened. In today's job market, employeers get hundreds of resume's. Adding certification criteria is commonly used by non-technical HR departments to weed out "unqualified" candidates.
I am not stating that I think the certs themselves are any guage to an individuals qualifications, but just indicating what they are used for by HR.
A well qualified candiate without a certification may not get the chance to prove themselves in a technical interview.
Its not the best method, but in the case of huge volumes of resumes, I am not sure what a better solution would be.
My current company goes as far as to start weeding process at 4 year degree. Without one, your chances of having your resume presented to a hiring manager are slim.
so... you are in a hiring posotion... Hey, buddy, i'm looking for a job, great news too, I don't have any certs. Hell, I don't even have a degree, I figure, why do I need one? I'm sure by this point, I'm pretty much a sure bet for getting this job, but if you want to actually do an interview as a free write off lunch or something, I would understand. We'll be in touch, nice doing buisness with you. ass
Don't Blame me if I seem bitter, I'm at work, and the TV only plays soap operas.
Surely taking one of these courses shows that you are at least willing to put the time in to learn something new which in an ever-changing IT world is more of a plus than a minus. The quality of the course is not as important as the willingness to give up spare time to learn something new and you could steer such willingness in the direction of worthwhile learning.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I've worked with a grand total of two people who had Java certifications: One was a "Certified Java Programmer" (which is another way of saying "I have a certificate that proves I know that Java uses curly braces to separate blocks of code"). This woman was one of the worst developers I have ever met, and definitely NOT someone you would trust to solve an actual problem.
The other was a Certified Java Architect. He spent 4 hours a day surfing EBay, 2 hours sleeping, one hour lying on his timesheets, and one hour trying to tell the Architect(s) that we should be using Together/J. Totally sucked.
When I see "Certified Java" anything on a resume anymore, all it does is make me more skeptical about the other experience listed on the resume, which is typically sparse. Few people even bother with this stuff if they have actual experience to draw on.
Certifications improve your chances at getting hired.
:-)
That's it.
If an HR person is looking at two resumes that show equal experience, and one resume lists a certification even remotely relevant to the position that needs to be filled, guess which candidate has an edge?
I have edged out other candidates twice because I have a CCNA. Am I an IOS guru? Hardly -- I'll be the first one to assure anyone of that in any situation. But because my core experience was good, the router cert helped make out. (the jobs in question were in QA testing of VoIP and other network applications, so the router experience was relevant)
Also, the folks who screen your resume (HR) are used to working with people from *all* professions -- not just our narrow little world of tech -- where career credentials are common yardsticks for measuring accomplishment and skill.
Certifications demonstrate also that you had the wherewithal to take and pass a long boring multiple-guess test. Sometimes that in itself is a differntiator, regardless of whether the cert actually makes you an expert in anything. (Remember the SATs?)
Whether certs actually give you any kind of skill at all is another story.
A bunch of people here have complained that certs mean nothing, that they don't guarantee knowledge, and a few of you have even say listing a cert on a resume makes you LESS inclined to consider someone.
Look at it as a college degree is looked at. It doesn't guarantee knowledge necessarily. What it does is demonstrate some sort of commitment to taking a class and passing an exam, at that takes at least some work, time and money.
A cert does not make you an expert, and the experts have no need of the certifications anyway, so what they really are, are baseline tools. If you pass the RHCE exams, you know the person has a certain set of knowledge at a minimum. It may not be expert level, but you know to some extent what they have proven (in a test at least) what they know.
Also, look at the cert as a tool to the early professional. A training course and a few exams is a good way to quickly spin up into an area of IT you may not be well-versed in. Especially when it's an area dominated by older professionals who are well established. These guys tend to take up all the work and often don't want to delegate any to some know-nothing kid. The result is it's difficult for a new guy to build up his experience.
Over time, the certs do mean less and less as their work experience section grows larger. The cert is not for the guy in the mid/late phase of their careers unless they're trying to shift to a new IT area. Certs are like college degrees... they're of the most value to someone trying to get their foot in the door and build up some basic skills quickly.
Do you have a boyfriend, erica_ann?
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
I think certification can be meningful. It all dpends on the certifications. MCSE is worthless in my opinion because it consists of only written exams. You can just cram all the known questions and their answers and then pass the test.
Other certificaions like those from Cisco (CCNA for instance) or Red Hat (RHCE) are performance based. You actually have to work with systems on these exams instead of just answering theoretical questions.
The point of certifications thus becoms that you can show a MINIMUM of knowledge about a certain topic instead of expecting the one doing the hiring to just believe you when you say that you do know how to do things.
Now that may sound like insulting to some of the readers here, but hey HR departements have to deal with a lot of frauds in this field and so they need some kind of assurance.
There are 10 kinds of people. Those who understand binary and those who don't
IT certs are kinda like college degrees. It doesn't make you know the material. Doesn't really prove much of anything. I have a friend who's a navy pilot with a BA in woman's studies (and he's a man). I think the point to IT certs (and college degrees) aren't so much the knowledge they test on. It's more of a dedication thing. I was dedicated enough to my line of work to put up with the pointless classes and tests...
Why the hatred for those with certs? To me, a cert means that one took some time to learn some info about a certain area. I have two, both from vendors, that I was able to earn through the experience that I have. Does it make me talented because I took the time to jump through those vendor's hoops? I don't think they makes me better than an experienced person w/o them, but I also don't think they make me worse.
Do you have the same attitude for those with college degrees? Are they also "opportunists" with a "meaningless validation?"
"It's too bad stupidity isn't painful." - A. S. LaVey
It boils down to why you want to get the certification. Is it a respected/valued certification in the industry? What do you expect from it?
A while back I got the SCJP basically for the hell of it, so I didn't have great expectations riding on it. Much to my suprise, it translated into a small promotion, pay raise, and a nice little bonus. But that says more about my employer and director than anything, I think.
A colleague of mine also attempted the SCJP exam and failed badly. He commented that "passing the test doesn't mean you're a good programmer", and while I agree, a good programmer would certainly be able to pass the test.
The SCJP only really attempts to be able to validate the exam taker posseses the minimum baseline competencies in the language. I presume the same is true for many other of the technical certifications out there. If you want to take one for the hell of it, or if it's seen in the market as desireable, then take it. Just see it for what it is.
All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. - Johann Sebastian Bach
I was required to become at least MCAD.NET certified for my job. In order to maintain a certain level of partnership with Microsoft, our company needed to have X% of employees with some sort of MS certification. My company took care of the cost of the exams, allowing us to fail up to three times before having to pay out of our own pocket.
I have to say I learned a little bit more than I knew prior to studying for the exams, but I'm not sure the benefit was really worth the cost. But I received a cool lapel pin and membership card from Microsoft!
I agree with YankeeInExile.
I've been working for over 10 years in the IT field. I've never been certified or registered with any trade associations.
I charge $80/hr. for computer & network set-up & upgrades/repairs - $40/hr. for graphics and web site design work. No complaints from clients.
When I apply for positions with companies, my resume has plenty of projects and experience, so I never even get asked for certification.
If the resume is too technical for the interviewers to understand, they usualy will trust you and give you a chance to prove your self.
If a job posting requires certification, I become suspicious that they don't know how to find qualified people anyother way or they think if you pay someone lots they must be good.
I find most companies have good people doing the hiring. If you can get to an interview, you should be able to get some work - if you have the experience the need - certificate or not.
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
To be totally frank, that position seems quite dumb. If somebody has certifications but doesn't have credible work experience to back up the certification, fine. But I know that personally I put my JDK certification on my resume because I've got it, so why not. I didn't go out of my way to get it, just got it for free when I was working for a company.
No employer is willing to pay me to get a certification in something I already know
This is not always true. Larger corporations will do this and consulting businesses will also do this because it shows the expertise of their people. I've also seen situations where an employer will reimburse an employee for certifications if they pass the tests.
Finally, keep in mind that not all certifications are created equal. I knew a guy who passed the original MCSE exam without ever having touched a Windows NT system. But if you compare that joke to the hurdles you have to go through to become a CCIE, they are worlds apart.
A certification is just like a University degree. It's meaning is tied entirely to what's behind it. I can get a doctorate in just about anything if I write a check to some company in Mexico. Does it mean anything? No. Just like some certifications don't.
Similarly, a university degree is a helpful start, but in the end, it's your job experience that will do the most for you in the end. I rather doubt that anybody looks at my resume with 8 years of Java programming experience and wonders how I did in school. I also rather doubt they care about my Sun Java Certification.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Oooo, yea, replace one 500 dollar test with MANY 500 dollar tests! Easy profit for the testing companies, but does it benefit anyone else? No.
Perhaps we should start thinking on OPEN SOURCED CERTIFICATIONS (This is, certifications which are copylefted, open to the public, etc.)
Obviously certification companies are becoming a bad monopoly, just like Microsoft. I think it's time we start doing something about it, don't you think?
probably enter those so called certified certification issuers center, or whatever they call themselves, and tore the place apart.
I have also had this discussion with others, and the conversation can go one of 2 ways:
a) If you have 2 people with the same cred's and thay want the same job the one with the certs gets it. For no other reason than the certs.
b) "..it proves the applicant can learn new skills." from a guy who runs one of those "get certified" in 6 monthes places.
As far as I am concerned certs prove nothing, but your a good test taker.
I actually use that as one of my criteria. No offense to those that have the certs out there, but my hard and fast rule is that if there's a cert on the resume, I don't want to see it. I figure that when you write a resume, you are granted a page or two to really show off what you've accomplished and what you can do and if that made the list...
Well then you're a jackass I wouldn't want to work for anyway. You're probably an arrogant self-centered cockmaster who thinks the world revolves around him.
you can start learning, show demonstrable skill
Isn't that pretty much a description of certification?
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
So you're laid off, along with all the other people in America that got hit by the DotBomb. The State has a program for you to get certifications as a part of your unemployment. Every job you see advertised specifically requests said certifications.
You may be prejudiced against a great many decent employees who've been struggling to do the best they could with what they were offered.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The only thing they are good for is cutting down the pile of resumes from 800 to 50.
I ususally hire referrals, but if not - I refuse to look thru a monster stack of 800 resumes - most are total junk.
I think it also shows some dedication to bother getting it done.
i suggest getting off your LAZY BUTT and doing one even if its a CCNA or something basic.
Must
Consult
Someone
Experienced
Enough said!
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
If professional IT certifications are worthless, are professional certifications worthless as well? If that's the case, then realtors, CPA's, appraisors, and the like should just flush their certifications down the toilet as well.
Some certifications will bond you up to a certain amount. So, if you get certified with a company for a certain area of knowledge, this company may bond (insure) you for, let's say, $50,000. When a company hires you, and knows you're bonded for that amount, you're basically insured to do work on something that is worth up to $50,000. If, for example, you accidentally take down the company's network, which costs them $100,000, you're bonded for $50,000 and the company is only liable for the remaining $50,000. In such a case, if the task at hand (done incorrectly) was able to cause $100,000 worth of damage, the employer should have hired someone who was bonded for $100,000, or volunteers to insure the remaining amount.
Some bigger companies require their employees be bonded to limit liability, and also to evaluate who can work on what projects.
Bonding also occurs in other trades, for example, electricians, plumbers, etc...
Offers a "partner" program to companies, based off of the number of their employees who hold microsoft certifications and the levels of said certifications. Depending on what level of the partner program a company is, it can receive discounts on microsofts products, and so on and so forth.
We don't need no stinkin' certifications!
-Mac Guru
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
Let's face it, much of the IT world is still man dominated. Certification can help women, minorities, and other groups who, for one reason or another, are still discriminated against.
In 1989, I had a recruiter calling me and asking if I had 10 years of PC DOS programming experience.
Fight Spammers!
The point of certifications is marketing. Every piece of information that flows out of any company is marketing. The training materials and tests are intended to bring about a state of mind or a set of preconceptions that are favorable to the market position of the product.
"but people who buy meaningless validation strike me as opportunists"
so someone going to night school while working at mcdonalds 9-5 everyday just so they can maybe break into the networking world with their dream of CCNA, is seekign meaningless validation?
i would be very surprised if you worked in IT, let alone applied for a job with a real corporation (no your mom and dads company doesnt count). most likely, your one of those people who thinks that if someone wasnt a born genious with computers then they should be damned to even THINK of getting into the field. Doctors, dentists, accountants etc all went to school to learn how to practice their art properly. Saying that certifications are completely meaningless devalues the art of the sysadmin or coder. Saying you wouldnt hire someone based on having a cert on there resume stinks of so much elitism that i would guess you either are part of a MAC only shop or some kind of art gallery.
*disclamer I only have 2 certs and was employed before i got either of them right out of HS.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Not the only shining light, I too find my CISSP certification useful.
I am a highly qualified consultant of 15+ years experience. I live and die by recruiters deciding whether or not to pass my resume on to my actual customers.
Before my certification, I had to go into great length about how my semi-directly related experience matched what the job requirements. Now I can say "oh I'm certified in that specifically and have done similar things in the past".
Admittedly it doesn't speak to whether I'm really qualified, but if it gets me past a semi-clueless recruiter to actually speak with the hiring customer/manager, then it was worth but the time and money to get it.
Just be careful that you don't have too many certifications or list any lame/negative ones and it'll help you find work.
For those already employed, it looks great on a performance review and can help the justification for position or pay rate increases.
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
A while back I would have said that certifications were useful to show a minimum level of competence. Even if all you did was pass a test, at least that showed you had some knowledge versus the folks who claimed to know a system but were just bluffing.
Now I'm not so sure. I've been dealing with a bunch of security certified folks in the past two years and with just a couple exceptions, none were all that knowledgeable. The uncertified Linux geeks I'd worked with previously knew more about TCP/IP and networking than almost all the CISSPs I've met. Granted, the CISSP is a very broad cert, but you'd expect that a security engineer would understand at least the rudiments of TCP/IP.
At this point I'd hold a certification against someone. Why? The hard-core folks, the ones that are really desirable in your department, don't bother with them. IMHO, most of the rest (i.e., the certified) use them just to break into the business.
I dont have a Cert, but 12 years of experience.
not only did i find out that cert's dont help many who have them (technically) but sometimes even the contrary.
some answers on MCSE (at a time, i dont know how it is today) ware factually wrong, the reality did not match the answers required by (surprise surprise, by the vendor).
there is something bogus in a certification process that is made only by the actual vednors, and not a third party.
that said, i think of getting one or two, if the dickhead that gives value to them, will pay me more as a result, then so be it, sure ill take your money. i have an MS in BS.
I'm an architect at a software company, and I do a lot of interviewing of candidates, and I have to say that I completely agree that certifications are no substitute for actual experience. When I see a resume for a job candidate, I rarely place any weight at all on any certifications they might have on their resume. Why? Because whether or not they have J2EE certification, Java Programmer certification, blah blah, I am still going to ask them the same technical questions and/or probe for the same skillset. Just because they have a certification doesn't mean I am not going to do my job, which is to certify a potential candidate for US.
HOWEVER, those who tell you that getting a certification is a waste of time are probably giving you BAD ADVICE. Am I contradicting myself? No, and here's why.
On an average week, I might phone screen 1 or 2 candidates, and actually have a face to face interview with one. And let me tell you - I don't really enjoy doing this. Most people in my position don't either. If I wanted to spend my time interviewing people for jobs, I would have chosen a different career path. It takes away time from the job that I enjoy doing. Most of the time the candidates don't even pan out. Think about it -- how many candidates are turned down for every candidate that is given an offer? A LOT. Given such low percentages and the fact that I and people like me are quite busy and usually want as little to do with the hiring process as possible, who do you think we have as the first line of filtering for the stack of 1000+ resumes we receive every week?
It sure as hell isn't us.
Fine, you may have designed some super-cool distributed computing system using, or you may have written your own bytecode compiler, or you may have written large portions of app server code, etc. And you might put it on your resume, and it'll look really cool to us, the people who know what the hell you're talking about.
But to the HR person or corporate recruiter who is acting as the first person to sort through the resumes, you may as well be speaking in Klingon. They have no authority derived from knowledge to make any assessments about your skills. So they are going to look for EXTERNAL authoritative validations of your skills, like education and certifications. Sure, they will pick out resumes listing critical skillsets that we the engineers deem to be necessary for the job, and they are good at doing that as well. But they will likely prefer candidates with more external validators.
It is just human nature for us to look for experts when we are lost.
In short -- it may help you get your foot in the door first, so it's not a waste of time. But once you're in, don't expect it to mean anything.
Precisely not.
That is what everybody who has responded to me in this thread has failed to see: I do not believe that certifications require any demonstrable skill, since they can so easily be gamed. For three hundred US I can get a certificate that says my dog has the required skills.
A certification has exactly as much weight and proof-of-knowledge as a degree from the Grace L. Ferguson University and Storm Door company.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
When you look at a resume, what is on the paper is all you know about the person, and I have to screen dozens of resumes for every person who gets face time. I get resume's all the time that have line after line of alphabet soup certifications, those go right in the trash.
overload of certs tells me one thing about a person right off the bat, they spend TOO MUCH TIME on certifications and not enough time working.
I agree that the ability to obtain a certification does not qualify a person for the job but, they help get you into the interview process. I hold many certs and have a few years experience to back them up. What really makes me laugh are the guys that put the certs on their business card or e-mail signature. The only place I put mine are on a resume.
Fact: Not every job requires phenominal applicants. It's rediculous to toss this kind of qualification aside. The people who have certifications probably aren't going to be the best of the best, but most companies aren't looking for (and couldn't afford) those people anyways. If you're looking for someone really good you should be looking are references and prior work experience. If you're looking for someone to get a job done, certification gives you some idea of what you're getting into with a candidate. In the worst case you'll realize they're stupid in the interview.
A degree carries more weight. Sorry, it does. There are plenty of degree holders that aren't worth a shit too, the ratio of useless degree holders to useless cert holders is lower. It's a generalization. Also, anyone who has 75% of a degree and has been "working on it" or "planning on going back to finish it" for over 4 years (if you're going part time it might take 7 or 8 years to get a degree, I'm talking about they've pretty much given up and haven't touched it in a couple years) keep your eye on these people. The degree says that someone can learn stuff and that they can be persistant, it's not about skillz. When you have someone who can't close the deal then they are looking for the quick easy out, know that when you put them in a job. Quick and easy has its place, these also might be people that have trouble getting their mind around new ideas.
Actual experience is better than any cert. If you've maintained a network for 3-5 years, that says more to me than a couple of cisco stamps and bouncing between jobs for 5 years.
Multi-cert guys that haven't held a job for over a year on average. Avoid them. Saw one, had CISSP, a handful of sun certs, a handful of cisco, some kind of MS cert. No degree. In his ~10-13 years he had been at close to 30 different jobs; lot's of failed .com and a couple of big jobs. Sure enough, we hired him and he was useless, didn't want to work, just be paid for "being smart" He left and made a big stink on his way out, tried to damage morale, etc. There is also a tendancy to perpetually work on the resume, they shy away from non-sexy work that won't "benefit" them in their next job. Cert or no cert, avoid the job hoppers, being able to stick a job out for 2 years or more is worth something; there are always circumstances though.
"Cert guys" are definitely more useful in a consulting capacity. Define the job well though.
Certs are about skillz, if you find a guy who is all certed out but can't actually do things, stay away.
With new people, regardless of degree, no degree, certs or not, if they only have 2 to 3 years or less. They are green, no cert makes them a pro. Then need mentoring and help to mature as professionals. Doesn't mean they won't be useful, doesn't mean they aren't intelligent, it just means that you need to have the right expectations and maybe help them some. All the rules don't apply to new people, they are new and that's that. Getting a cert or 2 can be much cheaper than a degree, depending on their financial situation, they might be great workers or they might be worthless.
There is the respect issue. I'm a pro. I expect to be treated as one, I treat my coworkers as professionals. When they are superstars and I see that I give them more respect and they do the same to me. You can perform and command respect because of it or you can show up with a shiney new degree from Harvard or MIT or your CCIE and you can try to demand it. Anyone who flaunts a piece of paper and demands respect for it rather than performing, avoid them. You've made a mistake when you have them. Pride is normal and it's one thing, pride can be good but I'm not talking about being proud of your school or accomplishments. Actual performance and real results cannot be argued with, it's the best way to get more re
Isn't that some bombad, 6 hour, hands on test (real world troubleshooting). This is an example of where you need to 'prove' your knowledge. Those guys are so focused on what they do, I wouldn't want some one screwing with my company's router configuration without being qualified. Plus, I hear it is hard to get access to Cisco documentation without paying for it.
A degree from a vocational institute might be comparable to a certification, and in fact many of them do offer certifications as part of their curriculum. Buyer beware.
But a BA/BS/MA/MS/etc. is not supposed to be about proving that you know a certain body of knowledge. It's supposed to prove that you know how to educate yourself and that you understand deeply the fundamental principles behind a discipline.
Otherwise CS departments wouldn't graduate such shitty coders on such a routine basis, who are so ignorant of the state of the tools and technologies in their professional field, and so ill-equipped to perform professionally that they end up getting treated like interns for the first few years in the working world.
CS generally is the worst of both worlds, though of course YMMV.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Anyone remember stats? How many data points do you need to determine a trend?
Since no one has ever walking into a job interview with the exact experience an employeer is looking for, a hiring manager needs enough "pros" to outweigh the "cons" of hiring an employee.
Certification is just a data point.
So if the employee is fresh out of school with just a couple years of experience, perhaps the certs help set him or her apart from the other candidates. If an employee nails the interview, perhaps it doesn't make a hill of beans that they aren't RedHat certified.
I guarantee a resume with your name and every certification known to man on it and no experience won't get you a job, but many people who have IT jobs are certified. Get it?
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
I was hired by a defense contractor a year ago to work on a small time-and-attendance database using Oracle Forms as the front end. This was a complete career-change for me; my only previous related experience was two database courses in college and a part-time internship where I installed and configured an enterprise facility maintenance database on a development server. What got me my current job was 20+ years experience troubleshooting military avionics - a good number of the managers I work for are retired military themselves. I was hired primarily to install, configure, and maintain the Oracle database and application servers with software development/maintenance as a secondary responsibility.
Certifications were not required for my current position (a bachelors degree in MIS or a related field was), but I have been working on my own to obtain an Oracle OCA certification to:
I also plan to begin a Masters in Software Engineering next year. But until then, if I'm laid off, I'd like to have something tangible to put on my resume.
What?
A certification is quite different than a Bachelor's of Master's degree [or at least, it is if you get one of those degrees from a good school]. If you can't see the difference, then you only have the former.
So where do you hire? We'll check the laws and see if you are breaking them.
And anyway, you are prejudiced: "abysmal", "meaningless".
I have certifications and they meant something yesterday. Today they mean 1 more thing: I have almost no chance to work for you. Were they worth it? YOU BET!
... on the quality of the cert. If the tests are well written, then they certainly help employers weed out candidates. If I have 1000 resumes in front of me, the one's with certs tell me that they actually had to have known the information that was on the tests within the last year. This is good. Anyone can type up a kick-ass resume. Anyone... With a cert I know he not only knew the information contained, but that he went through all the steps to do so. That alone is good info. Unfortunately (very unfortunate), some bad certs crept in from some very large companies (ahem) which watered down their importance.
The rest of the interview process will tell me if he is socially adept, and I can ask him various question and within a few moments be able to tell if his applied knowledge is at par with what I am looking for. The cert helps me in this way. I'm not going to interview 1000 candidates.
And I love my two Apple certified people (desktop and portable) because they can order parts right from Apple, and they seem to be very knowledgeable.
So yes, certs are good from the employer's point of view, which is why they exist in the first place. I just wish there was a way to "certify" the damn certs to ensure quality testing, but...
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
- actually fixing the system, or
- offering the service of backing up the drive first for the customer
- or selling the cutomer a new hard drive so the the old one could be set up as a secondary, with all data intact
Certification is supposed to validate technical expertise. The system is obviously fawlty. Right now all it certifies is that the people who are certified know enough to be dangerous.The solution is an internship program, or an apprenticeship program, where a person gains the experience to become trustworthy.
Note to BHO types, this might not install morals, but that is another situation entirely.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
might be that pin ball was their religion ....
On the other hand, if someone has a raft of certs and none of them apply to anything, then that indicates a very definite problem with focus, attention to detail, and goal-setting.
Certificates are just like computers and software, you target that which will get the required job done.
This
If the person has no or little experience, don't hire him. If he does have experience, then you should hire him. If you don't care about certifications, then why would you look at them at all, even as a negative? Is the employee supposed to leave off his certifcations just in case he runs into someone like the OP, and risk not getting a job with someone who does care about certifications? Stupid.
The job of a hiring manager is to look at the resume as a whole, and figure out if the person is worth hiring. If the hiring manager just has some stupid positive-negative point system, it would be more efficient to replace him with a machine.
Well, please feel free not to apply for any of the positions I advertise for.
Will do.
I have no certifications to speak of and agree that they are meaningless to hiring outside of the most entry-level positions, but your arbitrary decision to exclude people who list them is just as dumb as an arbitrary decision to only interview people who have them.
You know I have exactly the same response to those people who show up with more than one college degree or phD. When I see that on a resume I immediately toss them in the trash bin. Who needs the pedigreed rocket scientists. Give me the hobbiest any day. /sarcasm off
As the other gentleman stated, you had some valid points up until you made that foolish comment. And now with your follow-up you are just digging yourself in deeper. Stop now and spare us any further pain.
Glad I don't work for you.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Wow. You're in a hiring position and just admitted publicly that you're pursuing illegal practices. With no certifications, It'll probably be pretty difficult to get a job after you get fired from this one.
As much as I despise the typical certifications and their teaching/testing industry, there are many government agencies that must rely on them. Quite simply, the US has twisted itself into such politically-correct retardedness that having a degree, a certification, or recorded experience is the only way that a worker can be evaluated. That doesn't just affect those on the actual government payroll, but also applies to the way contracts are bid out, proposals are written, and subcontractors are hired.
I don't like that subjectivity is mostly removed from the process, but otherwise abuses can easily occur. The self-taught guy may get weeded out early, but so will the HR manager's drinking buddy. I've worked with some incredible people that had no formal education and some schmucks that carry a heavy resume, but for the most part, the people that have formal qualifications are better trained and better suited for the positions.
Certs are a good way to get your first job. After that they are valueless. My wife is in a profession that also has a lot of phony-balony certifications. We have dozens of them hanging in the bathroom - along with our old MCIWorld stock certificates...
You must be an employee somewhere. Consultants and business owners like letters after their names.
I want my employees to have A+ or INet+ after their names so when I advertise, I can say that all my employees are properly certified.
The general public reads that as a security statement. They are in good, qualified, hands with our company.
Consultants put the letters after their name because a normal person in the world will call a certified tech with the same price as a non-certified tech around 9 times out of 10 (not proven, learned from experience).
If you work for a company, and someone comes on board who is certified, and you are not, and they hold that over your head, sure - it means nothing. But it may have gotten that person the job over the non-certified guy they were competing against.
Only victims make excuses
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
I would agree with this, if the candidate had limited experience, but then had a low-tier certification. This might indicate an obvious attempt to simply beef up the resume. So I'm not going to come right out and call you a complete ass, since you might have a point in this circumstance.
However, for an already good candidate, one with several years experience, and a well-considered, higher-teir certification (like the RHCE), the certification should push them over other like-experienced candidates with no certification.
www.mitwebcam.com: one of the oldest webcams in the world.
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
A certification is a claim about you made by someone else, in its broadest sense. It can be made by names you trust (say, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on slashdot) or by names you don't trust (Auntie Edna's resume acronyms *CHEEP*).
The only thing that matters about a certification is how your target audience feels about the certifier and what is being certified. If the hiring manager for your dream job has packed the job description full of acronyms and certifications, you should care about them, and if not, you're probably fine without.
The key idea? The certificate only has value if the person you're trying to convince is convincable by that certificate. Since everyone is different, each certification will have variable value. Figure out what you want to do, and who you have to convince, and then the certificate question will, for you, be as clear as night and day.
In Soviet Russia, us are belong to all your base.
Now that I tossed that statement out there, I'd like to clarify it some. I do feel that most certifications are useless. With few exceptions, they don't really reflect any real-world ability to perform the job, just that you've been able to demonstrate a base level of knowledge regarding a technology.
With that said, there are certifications that are usually indicative of a real skillset. Cisco's certifications are generally useful. Many certs in the security field are relevant. The old Novell CNE and Microsoft MCSE certs are next to useless. In my own work, the only certification I have ever bothered holding is the entry-level Apple Certified Help Desk cert, and that's just because a certification was required for entry into Apple's consultant program (which has been extremely valuable for my business). Even that certification didn't require any coursework - when I read the description, I signed up for the test and took it a couple of days later, sight unseen. And passed it in about 15 minutes.
That doesn't mean I'm an übergod of Mac OS X, it just means I knew the material well enough to pass the test easily. My experience is far more relevant.
When, in my prior work life, I was a corporate IT manager, I did not really use certs as a hiring criteria. I did look to see if they were present, but I was much more interested in reality. The ironic part was that the first IT person on my staff to take advantage of our company's (then) generous education benefits to get certified left almost immediately upon getting the MCSE cert to go work at a dot-com for ludicrous money.
Times were different then...
The biggest problem with certifications is that they usually provide an inflated view of a person's skills. But the bigger the organization, the less likely it is that you'll find people who have the time to look through the alphabet soup and can see the real skill overview. I don't know of any good solution, especially in the lower-to-mid level jobs.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
We have had bad experiences with junior certified people in the past. Actually, the last 2 junior people we hired (who were certified) didn't last more than a couple of weeks. Alot of people asked me what happened and I used to say it was like hiring a mechanic who didn't know how to do an oilchange. I honestly have no idea how they got certified without picking up at least some of the basics.
On another note, I used to work for a company that has a certification program (a popular one) and I was part of the onsite customer support team. They never asked me once to get certified and I sat with some of their largest customers.. There could be only one reason for that.
The only certification programs worth any grain of salt are ones that require a person to sit in front of a computer and throw some real life situations at them (they can have the software/hardware manuals I don't expect people to remember syntax of commands you may never have to use off the top of their heads). But I don't think there are too many of those around.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
1. For the PHBs and everyone in management who rightfully insist on a core level of competency for new hires and need some sort of metric when references, years of experience aren't satisfactory or need to be validated.
/. posters professing knowledge could pass a simple A+ or Network+ test, let alone that something more involved like Cisco's base CCNA, or the Microsoft MCSE set of tests. And for all the Linux geeks laughing at the MCSEs, I'd wager more than a few dollars that if they tried taking a RHCE exam, many faces would turn red from embarrassment.
2. For the HR folks who are often ill-equipped to evaluate competency levels.
3. For prospective applicants to improve on or dress up their resume. This applies especially to Americans who traditionally have had no opportunity to see abbreviations after their names.
4. For anyone involved in teaching (or selling teach materials) to establish graduation status.
5. For anyone who needs to determine or otherwise establish they know their stuff.
The explosion in the use of certifications is admittedly fair game for fun, but when the tech field reinvents itself every few years, it should be understandable that everyone can be left wondering how well anyone knows anything.
If you've been involved in hiring, or worked in management, you know that references can't always be trusted, and experience is not always a measure of competency. How many secretaries who have been using Word for more than 10 years really know the program? Similarly, I think it's a legitimate question how many regular
Personally, I hate tests of any sort, and even tend to be suspicious of people that do well on them, but I'd be the last to dismiss their purpose or useful, irrespective of the test or who administered it. All the established professions have their legitimacy established using a test, and most have some form of continuing education that requires futher testing and certification. It would therefore seem fair, therefore, for anyone in the tech field be required (as needed) to do the same.
Clearly the point is to make money for the companies giving them out.
> So what is the point of getting IT
> Certifications? To have a piece of paper?"
Duh! What in life ISN'T about that? Does a driver's license mean you're a good driver? Does a beauty school diploma mean I'll get a good haircut from you?
Dang, you can't even get a life insurance payout from a loved one's policy unless someone gives you a piece of paper saying the guy's dead...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Also, I think I know what this guy means. It's one thing if someone has some small note in this resume listing some certifications, but I've seen people who'll put an insignia right at the top, bigger than anything else: A+ certified, MCSE. In my experience, good techs rarely value their MCSE very much (even if they have it).
Why? Isn't that the point of a Hobby? Generally something different that makes you an individual. Many resume experts suggest putting a hobby in, as long as its not something that might offend or scare someone off. I don't see how pinball would do either, and I'd personally be intrigued by said persons skill.
I heard of a hiring manager that would take resumes, fold them in half and hold them up to the light. If the left and right margins weren't even, he threw them out. If you couldn't even figure out your word processor, you probably couldn't figure out a lot of stuff.
Aside from the HR tards and the PHBs, compliance is actually something important.
The last two places I've worked for have been pharma companies. If the FDA comes in to inspect, they ask who runs the servers, I say I do. They ask if I am qualified to operate the servers, I show them Solaris cert, questions end.
It's a check the box for the validation paperwork. Required? No. Handy? You bet your ass.
why would i want to wrk for a dimwitted PHB? I have, in fact, declined jobs or cut interviews short if any sort of red flag goes up (the company/department appears disorganized, the people i would e working with of low quality etc.).
Since I have been around the block a few times, it is as the point where the interview is everything. I just breifly scan the resume to make sure they have the minimal qualifications (usually college degree and X years experience)and then use my sense of their problem solving ability as well as my sense of their social skills to make my judgement. Certs, since they do not have any accredidation, are useless and also have no legal bearing.
Hiring, after all, is *not* an exact science.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It's long been regarded as good practice, at least among employers I've encountered here in the UK, to have a simple written statement of what the company looks for during a recruitment process, including anything that will be used to automatically disqualify candidates. This is sensible anyway, since it avoids one particular interviewer's prejudices artificially affecting the process. However, it also guarantees that everyone's singing from the same hymn sheet, so if someone is rejected on grounds like this, there's a clear policy to justify it and it can't be turned around into some sort of discrimination case because the unwanted candidate also happened to be black, female, or whatever.
Screw that. If a company can't even apply its own tests of technical merit in the hiring process, and then can't fire someone crap for the same reason, your economy is doomed by your own legal system. I support, with reservations, legislation that prevents discrimination against groups who are clearly the victims of widescale prejudice that should be irrelevant to their ability to do a job. However, that is the absolute limit of how a company's hands should be tied when it comes to staff selection; requiring a company to employ someone they really don't want is unlikely to be good for either party.
(BTW, the "with reservations" above is only because I have personally encountered several cases where this legislation was abused by the supposedly disadvantaged party to force a win-win proposition at an employer's expense, and very few where it was used to seek redress after genuinely inappropriate discrimination. I certainly do not condone inappropriate discrimination where a decision is not justified on other, more objective grounds.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You either have it or you don't. Certifications not going to help you at all.
Tell me, counselor, how is it an "obvious" attempt to mask hiring discrimination? People don't put their age/sex/race/photos on resumes. I can understand your concern if a [insert undesirable minority here] actually goes through an interview, but we're dealing with throwing away a resume before anyone's ever met the person.
By your logic, I can send in my resume to Microsoft and list qualifications that are in no way related to the job. When they throw it away without so much as giving me a phone call, I have standing to sue (assuming I belong to a specially-protected class of people)?
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
As an HR Consultant within IT services, I often receive resumes that have certifications. From a money perspective, a certification may very well help to add to your personal bottom line. From a practical point of view, a certification demonstrates knowledge in a specific area of expertise.
The original reasoning behind certifications (within technology) was to validate what an individual already knew. This is not the case today since certifications are used to gain entry into a particular area.
I can confidently say that all of the hiring managers that I support regularly say to me that the certification(s) that a person holds is fine so long that they can perform the duties and responsibilities of the position.
Additionally, in our litigious society, the certification process is used by some firms in order to further insure against lawsuits from their clients.
If you are one of the people with knowledge in a particular area of information technology, use the fact that the recruiter may not know what you do as an opportunity to educate them. This goes a long way towards that recruiter working on your behalf.
For those of you that hoping to land that next (or first) position/contract, you want to consider using language that a layman can easily grasp. Explain the projects that you have worked on and the technical environment (you may also want to consider placing the details of the technical environment in a separate paragraph).
In conclusion, the certification of technical skills is still important, as it adds value (and money) to the technical environment that you are working in. For my part, I hope that the certification process goes back to its roots; it should be used to validate experience.
What kind of logic is that? 'A' does not require 'B' Someone with 'B' may or may not know 'A'. Thus, having 'B' means you do not know 'A'. QED? Absolutely not.
My spoon is too big.
Wait, I've got it. The people that do the hiring could structure their interviews around determining that their candidates can do the job! What a novel idea.
I don't really do IT work, but there are a lot of certifications in my field. Six Sigma belt certs, PmP certs ect. I've worked for a company that will hire you based on paper, and I've worked for a company that would put you through a multi tiered several day interview process. Complete with shadowing with current employees and then getting feedback from the employees on if the candidate knew their stuff.
Sure, the latter costs more and is a more complex hiring process. But take a guess which hired better candidates that fit the company's needs exactly?
But prejudice against those who may have gotten them for other reasons?
There's only so much room on a resume (one page). You put the best stuff on there. If you have certs on your resume, it's because you don't have anything better to put there.
It makes it easier for an HR person who knows absolutely nothing about technology to know that the person sitting across from them is not just spouting bullshit, but can actually *follow the manual* and get something working. It also shows that the candidate is willing and able to tow the line and jump through the hoops, which are inevitable in organizing a large group of people.
For most managers and vice-presidents, IT workers are commidities -- they're all basically the same, replaceable parts. Some may be better or worse in the end, but overall they're doing the same basic job. A certification is a double-check against work experience on a resume. If you are the greatest admin ever, bonus. However, all they are worried about is getting someone who doesn't jack everthing up.
Imagine you are an HR person and you know nothing about computers. However, you have to bring a new admin on board in a month. Let's look at your strategies:
It's to risky to bring someone on board before you know that they can actually do the work. So, you have to get a resume, check references, and interview the person. The resume says that they have 10 years experience with X. Do their references agree with that? Do they sound like they know what they're talking about? If they *really do* know what they're doing, why can't they spend a few hundred to get the cert? It sounds like that person would be someone who may not be a team player, or not be able to handle the bullshit that you have to effectively deal wtih in a large organization.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
While working at one place the PHB went on and on about a new IT person they hired. All sorts of academic awards, top in the class, etc.
The first day they sat in front of the computer and they said - "How do you turn on the computer?"
Apparently they never had a home computer and the computer's in the school's labs where always on.
Nice enough person but very limited in the IT knowledge area. Anything outside the text book knowledge base and they where lost. Small little issues would require them days of research to find the solution as it was something they had not just covered in a text book. Innovation and creative ideas where not there strong point.
I find that in computer programming you are almost an artist; creating a logical flow of information. It is impossible for a text book to teach this sort creativity.
The best way for a PHB to see you not only have the technical knowledge but the passion for the field is to look at the job experiences, hobbies or clubs you belong to.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
- The evaluator's personal evaluation, but in the case of IT many hiring personell know they don't know enough.
- The endorsement of an associate who the evaluator trusts.
- Various degrees of separation of trusted associates (your vice president, your vp's coordinator, your vp's coordinator's brother, your vp's coordinator's brother's schoolmate)
- Claims made by the person under consideration themselves are the lowest form of endorsement and hold no weight until verified with sources of trust.
IT certifications are good if you don't have an inside friend in a company. They companys' providing them build their "trust" because they often have a reputation that would be harmed from being too incompetent or corrupt with their evaluations. Certifications are like a college education without the actual education; you're buying a reputation and some level of assurance that others trust.Personally, I've had better luck with getting hired because people saw where I graduated college from (even though I was an engineer rather than a CS major) and people who knew my name from my controversies in the school paper and clubs I belonged to. My only regret is that I didn't join a fraternity since they often have their own networking systems. I know a lot about CS and IT from work experience, but getting a job is always about making a point of trustworthy contact with someone in the company rather than showing off what I know or even what prior work I've done.
If you pass a certification and the company is revealed to be allowing rich students to purchase passing results, then it's no longer a trustworthy endorsement and it loses it's value. A college education often does not succumb to similar corruption because it provides more sources of trust you can exploit than simply your passing test scores.
overload of certs tells me one thing about a person right off the bat, they spend TOO MUCH TIME on certifications and not enough time working.
YOu do realize that after an 8 hour (or even 10 hour) work day, there's still plenty of time to do other things...right? Me, for instance...I work as a UNIX admin, and I am back in college again. Other people could be using the time to get certs. Lets see...168 hours in a week, 40 for work, 40 for sleep, 10 for pre- and post- work work-related activities (driving, etc). That leaves 78 hours a week for getting certs (or going to school), cooking then eating dinner, having sex 4 or 5 times, and still a bit of time left to play in a band. Wait, that sounds familiar...
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
That's not the definition of "not considering them at all". That hurts people who just keep them on the resume so that they can get past any stupid first-level hirers.
Are you saying that you would prefer a good candidate who didn't list certs to a stellar candidate who did (for the few hirers who can't figure out he's stellar)? Or just that given two equal candidate you'd prefer the one who didn't list certs?
To me, certificates don't really prove anything. All it proves is that the person that took the certification can take a test and pass it. MO on that. I really lost all respect for certifications a few years ago when working at an Internet Help Desk. I supported DSL, dial-up, domain, and email configuration questions mostly and would get at least a few calls a week from MSCE certified users that would call and say "my name is *insert name*, I'm MSCE certified and I was wondering if you could help me with setting up this email account."
I'd answer "do you mean for the POP and SMTP server names sir?"
A reply would come, "no, I mean setting up the actual account in Outlook, I don't know how to do that."
I would get calls like that at least once a week. Since then, I don't believe that certifications prove anything more than the person can read a book and memorize answers for a test.
Certs only exist so that interviewers / HR people who are otherwise not capable of judging a candidate's competence can look and see that they at least passed some sort of test.
At companies where technical interviews are handled by competent technical people, the value of a cert is low. They'd rather determine your competence themselves.
At companies where your resume' is checked by a PHB, certs have a higher value.
IMHO, Interviews should be handled by some one who knows about the skills necessary for the job being applied for. This is not always the case.
Where I work, we could give a shit about certs, or college degrees, or even HS. If you know your stuff, you know it, be ready to prove it. Period.
What about the case of the 9 year old girl who got her MCP certification. Makes you wonder about how hard the certification is and what it actually tests for.
If your saying "you should have them do the real work" that isn't a viable option because....
Once you have a reputation as someone who will hire people without the piece of paper, everyone will apply!!
To give you an example, last round of hiring I was involved in, we wanted three (3) Computer Science grads for entry level positions. C/C++ knowledge required, Computer Science/Computer Engineering degree required, etc.
We recruited at 3 colleges - where we got the respondents we wanted and eventually hired. But we also were required by our company to post the job internally - it's a large well-known company, and the internal posting (which shows up _somewhere_ externally, don't ask me how...) generated 40+ leads, all of them bogus. Including an aeronautical engineer in Russia without a green card. Including a mechanical engineer in India without a green card. Including other people without degrees, without a clue what C/C++ is, etc, etc, etc.
You cannot possibly evaluate all the people that will apply if you leave the position unqualified - it's hard enough when qualification ARE required. Even when qualifications are required, the effort to remove the unqualified from the process requires effort. You simply must have some prescreen that can be applied. The "piece of paper" test is one of those. You can demand some basic proof of competence that an HR drone can use to whittle down the pile from 1000's of applicants to a few who at least have the background required on paper.
Certs are good for culling the herd. I recently completed and passed my CISSP. During the week long process/cram session that was involved, one of the stories that came out was that a company was hiring people and they didn't REQUIRE a CISSP, but they did recommend it.
So what happened?
Well, of the 1400 resumes that came in, a search was done on the word CISSP, there were approximately 68 with CISSP on it, guess what happened to the other 1332 applications?
So, even though it's recommended, it's very tough to get past the HR department if the hiring manager comes through and says, just look for people with such-and-such on their resume.
the certification is tied to the understanding of the logic of programming/networking/etc in a general sense.
A certification is quite different than a Bachelor's of Master's degree
That wasn't my point.
My point was that a certification can be as extensive as one of the aforementioned degrees. However, the big gripe about many current certifications is that most aren't even as extensive as a single college course, let alone an entire degree.
As I see it, the certification vendors see them as a way to profit. Only when they reorganize into a method of verifying a skillset at a bare minimum of cost will they begin to have some tangible value.
More
Certifications are only useful for those who are 1) Trying to get a job where they don't have several years experience working with a subject, but still want to show they have some general understanding of the information involved (a.k.a. getting your foot in the door). 2) As a stepping-stone for more advanced training and certifcations that have benifits such as discounts, support agreements, etc for large companies (e.g. a CCIE ).
Why all the hating on management/HR and people who hold degrees/certifications? Jealousy? I think so. Grow up boys and girls. It's petty and just reinforces stereotypes of the crabby pompous geek.
It is very difficult for someone to evaluate technology experience if they have none themselves. Say that a company is expanding their capabilities and need an Oracle DBA. How can an HR person tell the capability difference between two people spitting out techno-babble. Someone walking in the door with a cert from Oracle is huge. It shows some sort of 3rd party verification of the candidate's skills. The person may still turn out to be a bozo, but they're a better bet than someone without the cert. If all other things are equal, the cert would and should push them over the edge
Also, some of the more difficult certs are like degrees in that they show that the candidate can make a long term committment to something. They dug through the crap instead of throwing up their hands and bitching that it's a waste of time.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
...on what type of company you are working for. I work for a contracting company, and when you are putting together a bid for a contract that's out there, it's nice to be able to put the various certifications of your staff on there to make you look good. Sure, it's not going to do anything in and of itself, but if it comes down to your company and another company and you both have similar levels of experience, then having the certifications might put you over the top.
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
No, it means they have the money to afford to be in IT. I know plenty of over-certified people who don't have the first clue about what they're certified in.
You want me to work for your company but I'm not certified? Then I'm more than happy to prove that I can do the job - in fact, I'd prefer it.
Its shows that the management considers my welfare important. Mind you, its never happened anywhere I've worked yet.
Dug
Just what have you been smoking? The folks I've had the misfortune of working with that were certified tended to 1) Want to completely botch customer accounts instead of do what they were certified for 2) Teach what they are certified for 3) Go watch some hoops 4) Land a job closer to family. They also tended to be left behind when the basis of what they were certified in changed the slightest bit.
No certs and I don't feel they would have helped me even during my lengthy unemployment. Around here I really didn't run into any jobs that required them.
As far as my personal opinion, they are mostly worthless. The certs test you on so much minutia that's not worth learning, and in the end you have people who don't know a damn thing more than those without them. I think some of the certs (CISSP and maybe some cisco ones) are worthwhile, but especially with the MS ones, that cert tells you exactly 0 about the knowledge of the person in question. If I had a dime for every question an MCSE has asked me about windows I would be chillin on an island somewhere and not worrying about this bullshit.
You want to know what a meaningful cert would be? Have someone who has never done it before set up an SSH server and client and tunnel windows remote desktop over it. Have someone install and configure a linux box who has never done it. Tell someone to get OpenBSD up and running by using only information available on the web. Have someone write a program to check if a file exists and copy over the file if it doesn't in a scripting language they've never used before given only the web for research. You get people who can learn as they go and certs are irrelevant.
Personally I'd rather have 10 guys who are *real* computer people...not just people in it because it's the new middle management...than 100 paper MCSE's who can tell you some worthless bullshit about printing protocols but can't solve a problem they didn't learn about in class without 10 grand worth of training and a $300 book. Problem solving skills and knowledge of how to find stuff online is ALL you need. I tell people to seach Google groups and they look at me like my head is glowing purple. Do you know how many problems I've solved with that? People have no ability to evaluate sources, cross reference, and learn quickly. 99% of the information you need to do any project is out there, you just have to find it and know how to process it. There are people who "get" computers and those who don't. Certs were invented for all the people who don't. I don't need to memorize this, that, and the other thing about Windows because I'll just learn it when I need to know it. The more critical the project is the more care you take in learning it. Simple.
All this talk about certifications being a detriment when placed on a resume or just the general attitude that people that have certifications have "too much time" on their hands is extremely laughable. So you are telling me that people that take the time to go above and beyond what is required of them and pursue further education are bad? Damn maybe I should have kept playing Everquest in my spare time instead of doing all that extra studying to better my knowledge base lol. Seriously I would love to know what companies have these narrow-minded managers so I can put them on my DO NOT WORK for list...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
I had only the A+ cert (required by my last job) when I applied for my current position. I learned later that they asked 20 people in for interviews. Most had an alphabet-soup of certs going in. They did hands-on real-world tests on everybody. Linux and Windows. I got the job. But I have spent some more time (my employers spend the money, lucky for me!) getting some additional certs. You just never know when you'll run into an unqualified IT manager or an HR drone who isn't informed enough to ask an intelligent question about systems and rely only on certs/education to tell them if I'm qualified.
if it says on your resume that your certified, then you'll obviously get the job over someone who isn't certified..
companies are not entirely stupid though.. I think most educated HR personell, will look at a resume, and choose someone who has more experience as opposed to someone who has been recently certified.. I personally have 2 certifications from Brainbench.com.. its not the best place to get certified, but most of their tests are FREE, if you want the physical cert its like 7 bucks to get the nice shiney piece of paper with your name on it.. Its not much, but it looks good on my resume being that I'm a linux administrator.. there aren't many certs for Linux guys to begin with, so ANYTHING looks good on your resume..
HOWEVER, if you're obviously shooting for a job thats Cisco admin related, or you're a programmer, or a Windows Admin, then you will need that Cert in order to get the job you desire.. its that simple.. its much harder finding or even getting a job regarding the fields I listed above, without a cert..
bottom line, its all a matter of what you specialize in..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
If I were running a business, the cert is a good way of filtering out those who can't even pass a simple test.
Why do I not use certifications? Because the tests invariably cost money, and I would not expect anyone to play the "Certification Lotto" in order to get a job. If I had to get a certification for all the areas I have a skill in, it would cost me well in excess of $10,000.
I'd rather look at their work experience and then if they have the relevant work experience, then I'll bring them in to talk to the subject matter experts. If they interview well, they will likely get the offer. After that we have the 30 day trial to evaluate their performance under a typical workload. If they can get through all that, then they are worthy of the job.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
The point of certification is that people who are certified will more likely be qualified than people who are not certified, period. Of course there are specific problems like the ones you mentioned above, but that is no reason at all to scrape the entire system. Without statistical evidence that these situations occur very frequently or infrequently (which neither you nor I have) it's almost pointless to argue about it. You can make the same argument about a number of things including diplomas, degrees and medication just to name a few.
in game theory language, IT employment is a game of private information. workers know how good they are, but potential employers don't have this information.
for example, suppose there are two types of workers:
wh (high productivity worker)
wl (low productivity worker)
and the distribution of workers is such that there are p wh workers and (1-p) wl workers.
suppose that the benefit employers get from workers is equal to their type. this implies that in a competetive labor market a firm would be willing to pay a high productivity worker wh and a low productivity worker wl.
but firms can't observe the types of workers, so they pay the expected value p*wh+(1-p)wl as the industry wage rate.
so (assuming 0 less than p less than 1) firms not being able to observe worker types benefits the low ability workers and hurts the high ability workers.
now suppose that certification is available. to make it even more stark, suppose that certification does nothing to improve the productivity of a worker, but it does cost the worker something (time and effort). the cost for the high productivity worker (ch) is lower than the cost for a low productivity worker (cl) because the material and exams should be easier of the better worker.
the cost of the certification can be set up so that a separating equilibrium results. employers will pay a person with certification wh, while they will only pay wl to a person without certification.
additionally,
wh - ch greater than wl - 0
and
wh - cl less than wl - 0
so only high productivity workers will get certification.
this is a very basic view of signalling models, but i think it delivers the main point.
Originally, of course, the idea was that certs would help non-IT folks weed out the losers when hiring. If you run a small office, how would you hire your first IT person? By definition, you don't already have someone competent (who could judge the qualifications of an applicant), thus, you would have no way of determining who was good and who was bad. If only the good IT people had some kind of certification, given by an independent body, to prove their skillfulness.
Unfortunately, there are two problems with this idea:
- Since the people hiring don't know IT, they need certs to tell them who is good before they hire. But since they don't know IT they will also have a hard time judging who is good after they hire. It is relatively easy for someone who knows nothing to survive in IT for long periods.
- The people giving the certifications make money by doing so. This include the direct funds made by people paying to take the certification tests, as well as by the indirect advertising companies like Microsoft and Cisco receive.
Taken together, these two factors almost ensure that certs will be worthless. Their correspondence to their recipients' actual skills cannot be verified, and there is money to be made by having lots of people get them. Thus, certs are easy to get, even for people who shouldn't have them.You mean to tell me as a young person trying to become gainfully employed by getting certifications like Redhat and Microsoft MCSE that you are going to throw out my resume?
You interviewer doesn't care whether you respect it or not. He only cares that you have it.
-Tom
stooges and stoogettes that are the other part of the 'barrier to entry' that you have to get past.
These people have no skills, no aptitude and no desire to learn anything. They are given a list of 'requirements' and if your resume doesn't match the list, its chucked onto the 'unskilled' pile.
You may be good at what you do, and you may be able to prove it in an interview, but you'll never get that far. The HR people are there to prevent you from doing that.
If you're going to work for an outfit without the HR stooges, thaty another kettle of fish. Just remember that the HR stooges were hired because they were necessary. (frightening isn't it?)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
1. Certifications
2. ???
3. Profit!
Your immediate boss may not be the PHB that needs to see a certification. Even if you're surrounded by techies and you have a clueful boss, if you're in a larger corporation, it's the guy two or three levels up that's choosing who to keep after the company's next outsourcing push. What bits of information are going to find their way up to that person? Certifications? Certainly.
Once you've been "surplussed", suddenly the market's saturated with techies. If you have to clear HR's scrutiny before you can get interviewed by someone clueful, what bits of information are they going to notice that your peers have and you do not? "Sure he has experience, but this other guy is CERTIFIED."
I have no certifications, by the way, but I'm starting to eye them. I think the trick is shooting for some of the more advanced ones.
It seems to me this topic has come up a million times before. You can find this question being asked on any given "certification discussion forum" board on the net....
The answer hasn't really changed though. Basically, it depends to some extent on the price of the cert. as to how much "respect" it gets. It's all a bunch of "paper", of course, because certifications (like any other type of formal training) are no guarantee of retained knowledge. But the more costly and the more long and drawn out the process is of obtaining a cert. - the more a potential employer could look at it in a positive light upon seeing it on your resume.
(Let's face it. If you possess an expensive certification, it *likely* means you didn't really pay for it out of your own pocket. Rather, you already worked in that general area for an employer who thought enough of you to pay for you to get that training. If you weren't worth it, they probably wouldn't have invested the money in "improving" you.)
I've held my A+ for years, and to be honest, I don't really feel that it ever helped me get a job. Since I'm trying to do on-site service and computer consulting for myself now, it's nice to have it - just because it makes me look a little better on my web site. But in the grand scheme of things, these CompTIA certs. don't cost a lot to get, and they're relatively "easy". I got mine without ever buying a single study guide or taking a class. I simply took the free sample test questions found on a few web sites - and got the "gist" of the type of material they were interested in. I said "Ok... I know all of this already. I think i can pass that."
But I think for some people, getting certifications becomes a bit of an "addiction". They get a little bit of a "high" from the initial thrill of obtaining one - so they save up money and move on to the next, and the next. If I was hiring and saw somebody with 5 or 6 certs. in all sorts of scattered areas, I'd probably think "Career test taker!" more than "Incredibly knowlegeable candidate!"
Certs are good for the following:
1. Getting past HR screening to actually talk to the people on the back-end. This is especially useful if you're going after a first job in the field; you may be using a headhunter who can put you into contact with good, clueful employers but won't do so without seeing the right keywords.
A lot of time these headhunters are truly independent of the companies they send applicants too, so the cert is circumventing a somewhat mindless criterion but it's not sending you to work at a mindless company.
2. Getting raises/promotions in bureaucracies
3. Learning the background knowledge for an area you have no experience in if you can get paid time to take cert courses, etc.
Like all educational items, they're a lot less useful once you're established in the field and have a good resume of work experience and lots of contacts who trust your work.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
The tech people who have worked with me fell into two categories:
1. Those with college/university degrees in computer field. These people didn't give a stuff about certs (except for the CCIE, only because these people wanted a challenge).
2. Those *without* college/university degrees in a computer field had to prove themselves, so they were gaga over certs.
As well, those in group 2 seemed to want to flash their shiny pieces of paper around way more than those in group 1.
Vendor Partnership Status and Credibility with Clients. Microsoft Partners, Citrix Partners, Cisco Partners... we all need to continue to certify and have a minimum number of employees with applicable certifications.
I went on for a while about this in an artical that i wrote for the BSD certification list. I am a "Certified Lotus Notes Administrator" working for IBM. I am the ONLY Certified Lotus Notes administrator working at our desk. I took this certification over 10 years ago and while on paper I SHOULD be the one who knows the most about notes, I am the one person on the desk who knows the LEAST about it. That is the reality of certification. It is simply a peice of paper that proves that at one time I was able to write and pass a test containing some questions having to do with Lotus. It is, to say the least, a useless (If extreamly expensive) peice of paper. Here is the link to the artical if anyone is intrested.
r il/000338.html
http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/bsdcert/2005-Ap
So, yes, there is a case when a company (particularly a start up) might have a reason to prefer MCSEs.
Whether or not you should cultivate a relationship with such companies is left as an exercise for the reader.Certifications help you stand out among all the other people in your field if you run your own business. Customers that need to hire a computer expert are faced with many choices. There is always the chance that having an A+ or MCSE cert might cause them to call you as opposed to someone else simply because they think certs must mean you are better. I've moved out of tech but I am currently doing photography and photo restoration for people. I'm Photoshop certified for this reason. 80% of the exam covered things I'll never use in this field but having the ACE cert shows potential customers that I'm serious about what I do.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
There's nothing illegal about discriminating against certification. The only thing that is not legal to do with regards to discrimination is to discriminate against a certain group based on a set of specific traits (religion, sexual preference, marital status, race, etc).
I hate to tell you this, but people holding IT certifications are NOT a protected group in the United States. IIRC, there are 11 such groups, IT people not being one.
You can discriminate against anything else you want to discriminate against without committing a crime, as long as they are not a protected group. I can discriminate against people who eat hot dogs if I want to, they aren't a protected group either!
Technically the certification I have (Java certified programmer) is worthless. I could teach my dog to memorize the things they asked and get him to pass without ever having written a single piece of working code.
From a job search standpoint, however, it's definately a plus. I was looking for a job in late November and by Jan 3rd I was working. I had over a dozen interviews and even after accepting my current postition I was called back by 8 of the 12 companies I spoke to after the first of the year. The certification really turns on HR and MBA types and they are, after all, the ones that often do the hiring. Don't want to work for idiots? Good luck........
Although you make valid points, there are some pretty good reasons to have certifications. At least in theory.
The first, and most obvious, thing to realize is that certifcations are not really for programmers/technicians, etc. The certifications are actually for the non-technical people that need to hire the technical people. A certificate can establish that a person has at least the minimum required technical skills to do a job.
Then an employer can restrict the pool to just people who are minimally competent. Some may be worthless potential employees because of other problems (anything from social skills to a lack of ability to apply the knowledge that they have).
The problem with certificates is that a lot of people see it as a way to make a cheap buck. There's no serious capital involved once the test is established. You're just selling a piece of paper.
So then you get a ton of people with their eye on the bottom line out there tacking on the miniumum amount of training (got to keep an eye on that bottom line). And you get a lot of people who can't rely on their skills and want to just pass a test and get a pay raise.
So the system fueled by certifications has a lot of downside even though the essential idea is good.
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
It's easy to verify a cert as being legit. So what it tells you is the person had enough knowledge to pass the test and enough drive to go and actually do so. Is that a guarantee of skills? Of course not, but it does tell you SOMETHING at least. If someone has an MCSE and they've got a few years of Windows support experience on their resume, you can be reasonably certian that they actually know what they are talking about, when it comes to Windows. Again, no guarantee, but more so than if they just listed a job with nothing to back it up.
It's a question of priorities. As in, this guy had the time to waste on these certifications, he must be desparate for a job. Why is he desparate?
Personally, I'm prejudiced against people with college degrees too... the way I see it, if you're spending years in college, you're not a self-motivated go-getter who can learn independantly, you're just another drone who paid a fortune to be spoonfed and can't be trusted to do anything more than go through the motions like he's been taught.
IT is not the profession for those who need a teacher, it is a profession for those who prefer to teach themselves, because that's what you'll spend the rest of your career doing if you're successful.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You need to get a State ID. For these purposes it is functionally equivalent to a Drivers Licence. Also, Scanner + Fax Modem (and pretty much all Modems are also Fax Modems these days) = Fax Machine. If I remember correctly I had to use exactly this technique to turn my PayPal account into an interest bearing account.
This is one of those "Duh. Hey, the sky is blue" ask slashdots. Hell it's almost a troll.
:)
The only reason it got submitted is because Cliff thinks the asker is female
-1 troll / -1 flamebait
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
I wrote a blog entry on this recently.
h tml
.NET, where it is less common to use non-MS solutions for projects a certification may mean more, but it still has little value.
http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/archives/000218.
Basically it boils down to most certifications covering official specifications while developers spend most of their time with components which augment the official frameworks. In Java it is quite common to use many open source projects from Apache and other projects and these are not covered in the Sun/Java certifications.
For
I find the only case where certifications help is if you are working as a consultant and a piece of paper from MS, Sun, Weblogic, or IBM gives you some credibility to land a job. But I think a nailing a technical review/interview would be better than passing an exam any day. There is more to IT than technical knowledge. The soft skills are often more important and completely ignored by these exams.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
If you're going to use cliches in your rant, at least get them right. The expression is "Lo and behold!" Lo, as in "there!". Low as a verb is something a cow(-orker) does.
Oh, a know a few myself, too. But that doesn't make a person with a cert any less experienced. I have a cert, in a programming language. I use that language daily, hard code text, no WYSIWIG editors or anything of that nature. Any me *ANYTHING* within that language, and I can answer the question. Sure, I might have to hit the docs a couple times, but that's mostly cause this language has more built in functions than LosVegas has hookers. It depends on the cert, always had and always will. And the only way to understand the quality of the certs is to speak with everybody that's passed the tests. Then judging out of X people, how many actually truely don't know s*.
That is what everybody who has responded to me in this thread has failed to see: I do not believe that certifications require any demonstrable skill, since they can so easily be gamed. For three hundred US I can get a certificate that says my dog has the required skills.
Actually, no. In my post (which you have still failed to answer), I said "No, in most cases, certifications say absolutely nothing useful." As mentioned, I think they're pretty pointless, but my employer was buying.
But as someone else pointed out, there's a wide gap between thinking something is of no worth and actively penalizing candidates for having that something. It's the difference between not caring about eye color and binning the resumes of every blue-eyed candidate.
So why would you actively penalize candidates for having a certification on their resumes?
Try getting a high-level Cisco or Oracle certification. People who ask for these certs know what they're worth, and no adolescent know-it-all with MCSE-envy will be able to persuade them that they're just a piece of paper.
;)
Secondly, even low level certs are useful, for similarly low-level jobs. A MCSE will probably get you a helpdesk support line job before the tons of burgerflipper applicants without one.
Was it worth getting certified?
Definitely. Getting certified exposes you to some aspects of a product you might not have known about, and also might help point out some of the things you know that just ain't so, or at least just ain't so anymore.
Do you pay for them? Does the company pay for them?
I struck a deal with my boss. I paid for every exam, and if I passed, I got reimbursed. No risk for the company, and I had plenty of incentive to learn well enough to pass the first time.
Is it worth being certified if you do not get a pay raise for it?
Who's to say the pay raise you get is immediate? After all, getting certification demonstrates a
professional commitment, and it could be the dealbreaker between you and the other slack-jawed yokels you compete with for raises and promotions. Never ever forget that your co-workers are your competition too.
Also, it's makes getting that next job (and the accompanying pay raise) ever so much easier when it comes to getting passed the HR trollkin.
What certifications bring more than others? Are specialized more employable than general certifications?
My perception is that specialized certifications will always be more valuable than generalized ones. One of the key things I think Oracle does that I don't know if Microsoft and Cisco do is version their certifications. Just because you got an MCSE when NT 3.51 was king doesn't mean you know diddly about ActiveDirectory, f'rinstance.
Is there such thing as being TOO certified for a job?
Yup. Too many certifications and I'd suspect you're a dilettante, or that you spent too much time reading braindumps. A 25 year old with a CCNA, OCP, MCDBA, A+, and an MCSE probably lacks depth in any those products, and is therefore truly dangerous if unsupervised.
You know people who have certs that don't know what they're certed in? Come on, the worst paper CNE could tell you the 7 benefits of the NDS at the very least.
Look, I'm no fan of Certs but I don't discriminate against them. And I maintain a person who goes through the trouble of Certing DOES want to be in IT.
This
If you want someone to prove themselves, make that part of the interviewing process. The biggest concern many would have about teenagers is that they're notoriously flaky as a class. That's not the kind of thing you can find out in an interview, and certifications only focus on the ability to score well on standardized tests. In my experience, standardized testing isn't a big component of real life, whereas punctuality, reliability and work ethic are.
I was in high school when I interviewed for my first job. The job was database programming and I had been referred by the programming teacher at my HS. After talking to the owner of the company about my experience, I sat down at a computer and wrote a program to do data conversion. This was in 1988, so I'm sure other people have figured out this tactic by now. I've had 10 interviews, 8 have required a demonstration of ability and I've gotten 9 of the jobs. The one I didn't get only had HR style technical questions.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
That's exactly right. HR folks don't know much about computers, and so they can't simply test you; they wouldn't know what to do. But they do understand pieces of paper like diplomas and degrees as being important. Supposedly, certifications were created to translate technical knowledge into pieces of paper. Whether they actually serve that purpose or not is debatable.
I've found that in general the people that usually say the certifications aren't worth it are the people who themselves do not have them. I am certified and the only hesitation at all I had about becoming certified was the money it cost me to do so. Honestly, I had a good bit of industry experience going into the certification program and expected them to be fairly easy to obtain. I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the education the certifications offered. Real world experience had left its gaps in my knowledge of the material and I was pleased to have a more rounded understanding in the end. I've also found that people claiming the certifications aren't worth it haven't recently tried to switch jobs. My certifications proved to be invaluable both to increase my understanding and in obtaining new jobs. Whether it's a fair practice or not, businesses have to "weed out" applicants somehow and I've found more times than not they are first looking for those with the certifications. Those applications that come in without the certifications are simply pushed aside. As far as paying for the certifications goes, of course I would have liked my company to pay for them but that is not always an option as in my case. I paid for the certifications myself (nearly $10,000) but did receive a nice raise in the end. I did go from zero to seven certifications at once however so a raise I think was to be expected.
But, for example, it doesn't really hurt Microsoft all that much if a bunch of "Paper MCSEs" don't get a job as a result of their certification. They have other huge venues and it's not like it's MS' job to get you a job. They could stop offering certs tommorow and be fine.
Certification has never been profitable to MS on its own. Rather, MSCEs are likely to find themselves a job as developer for the windows platform, which means one less soul working for the competition (ie, Apple, FOSS, or previously OS/2, Borland, Sun, Zortech,..). The only way to get qualified programmers to doing a mind bogging certification is if you can convince them there's a job waiting.
Fortunately, certification has always attracted the less talented (in hope of leveraging either their skills or their credentials) while leaving the higher "caste" to just prove themselves through their CV.
>Or how about just the one I hire in.
As you don't say which one it is, your argument is meaningless because it does not prove whether it is illegal or not to discriminate. Mostl likely you're full of bullshit, though.
> I can safely say: Each certification decreases strongly your chances of getting hired in my organization.
OK, let's say it - you're underqualified for your job and afraid of losing it to someone better than you.
In addition, it's likely that you abroad because you can't compete in the U.S.
A prospective customer or employer has a limited amount of time to find a consultant or employee with the skill set necessary to perform the job. The customer or employer may also not have the expertise necessary to properly evaluate skill sets.
Certifications give the employer or customer a quick method of culling the resume pile to find a subset of people who will more likely be able to succeed at the task technically.
This is no different than a degree from a university, every university has bestowed a degree on someone who just simply doesn't know enough to warrant graduating. But it's a usefull indicator of someone who is more probably qualified for some particular tasks.
Is there a reason to pay for certification? Maybe. If to apply to the companies you want to work for, your resume has to pass through an HR screener, then absolutely. You won't get past the HR screener without all the right keywords on the resume. If you're a consultant who is frequently changing gigs, then again, it's a necessary part of your sales toolkit.
It's stupid. It's a waste of money. But it's not true that it brings no value to the person getting the certification. The value it brings is that it allows you to play the employment game on the terms the game is currently being played.
I dont think its necessarily an obvious attempt to mask hiring discrimination, but I do think that if the person who started this whole discussion actually openly states to people that he doesn't hire people with certs because he thinks they are stupid... Well then I can see someone talking to a lawyer after that. But who knows this guy could be the hiring manager for the local Petsmart looking to hire a crew of 2 sys admins at 30k a year to work on a network consisting of 6 workstations and an Internet connection... This kind of attitude does not fly at any of the large scale IT companies (at least no one would openly make the remark that started this).
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
And god help us when the day comes that people can police our thoughts and arrest us for thinking negatively about someone.
Now DISCRIMINATION is illegal, which isn't the case here.
A lot of people like to point out that certs don't prove you know anything, blah, blah, blah.
Personally, when I was in the process of getting my MCSE, I was administering a 3000 user NT domain. I worked with Windows and Exchange server every day, and I Knew My Stuff (tm). However, I learned quite a bit during the certification process. Many times there are things that you may not work with in your current environment that are covered in the certification requirements.
I also notice that most people that complain about certification are the ones who are not certified. I'm not sure how you can truly judge the quality of a cert if you have not achieved it yourself.
Finally, if you truly Know Your Stuff, you can just go take the test for $125 and get the piece of paper. If you need to attend $5000 worth of training to get it, then maybe you don't know as much as you think you do...
I spend alot of my time working with my vendors to make them happy and get certified. I have 1 vendor that has good and somewhat hard tests, you really have to know your stuff to be certified.
BUT I have one vendor whos tests are wrong. plain and simple, whenever I take the test I fail, then i make copies of the wrong answers, email whomever thought they knew how to make a test, that I'm actually correct in my answers and that they are not. Not once has this company and a few others thru history fixed their exams. I must siomply take the exam and answer the question WRONG to pass.
So certification is only as good as the person or company who wrote the test. Alpha-bit soup is simply a waste of time in my brain.
How come all IT people are stupid? Oh wait. I know. Because if they were actually good with computers they would have been able to get jobs in engineering. Nevermind. I figured it out.
...I am just a student employee at my college and I know more than some full time employees with A+ certifications. It's really kind of sad.
I find the certification, for example the MS cert for C# WinForms development, to be of interest primarily as a way to tell what I should know about the technology. When I take the practice test for my example test I find there are LOTS of things I don't know that I probably should, even though I have built some pretty nifty and useful winforms in my career already.
An actual set of letters to put after my name is not a bad thing, either. Can't hurt! Just because there are people who can put letters issued by a university after their names doesn't mean that everyone with a BA or MS knows anything worth knowing or can do anything worth doing. But the not unjustified assumption is that there's a good chance they do know or can do something. Without those little letters it is all a complete mystery. Same with IT certs.
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
If you own your own business it doesn't really matter but as soon as you have to show people that don't know you that you can be relied on they'll want some sort of assurance. Even if this assurance isn't a 100% thing they'll take it over nothing at all.
Sorry, but you have to be judgemental when hiring people; that's kidna the point of the whole thing. Hiring is simply judging the character and potential skills of the applicant. Additionally, he didn't say that he will never hire someone who HAS certifications, just that he views people who put them on their resume negatively. He personally feels that there should be more important things to put on that one page of paper than the fact that you took some short cert class and passed the test at the end. If that line of reasoning when hiring gets him the employees that he feels that he can work with and get the job done, then I say go for it. If he thinks all his employees are fucktarded, well I think then he should start looking at different methods in hiring applicants.
On one hand I agree that it is just a piece of paper, and I spent 4+ years after finishing college before I did my thesis and got my college degree....
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... (happened with a few tranings I attended in Europe, and it really sucked and it was a waste of time)..
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Many times they asked me to sit down and solve a problem and I was never asked for my school papers
However some might not want anyone poking around on e.g. their networks without any papers form a school/cert institute just the same way you do not want a self-made doctor poke around in your brain
The other thing that I encountered is the bigger trust in the formally educated vs the self-learner when it comes to some kind of conflict situatin
you might have the experience and the knowledge, and you might now that you are right, but the other guy might be right in front of your bosses because he has the paper you do not
that happened to me once (I was right by the way anyway) and I decided to finish my diploma work and get the paper I deserve
On the other hand I consider certificate type papers (not diplomas or year+ long educations) kind of useless.... they often do not require an underlying education so those classrooms are sometimes filled with marketing people and others that do not belong there, dragging the quality down
just my 2c
Certs show that you can do something.
OK OK, It is far too simple of an answer on the surface and there are a ton of "zero experience" cert'd techs out there. But at least these people could find a goal and follow it up with a bit of action. They have at least the competency to learn a bit about a certain technology.
And consider the hard side of not having a cert from the HR stand point; anyone can claim anything they want. I can tell you I'm a hot shot at something I've never touched and who are you to say otherwise? At least with a cert I have some minimal knowledge. Granted, I may know the material but as an HR manager how can you know the truth?
Perhaps the best answer is that a potential employee face some type of testing at the interview. It would help weed out the dead beats.
Also, I'd like for you to consider the tech's side of the cert... for someone who's looking to get their foot into a particular field within the industry it helps them know what might be expected of them. Too often young techs fall into a job with no or little experience elsewhere and feel that after a year or two they have their job down well enough that they can move to another company and do the same thing for more only to find that their little bit of exposure doesn't hold a candle to the fullness of the field they're trying to work in.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Note: I'm basing this reply on this and your other replies in this thread.
You are either a troll or very blind to the rest of the world.
You apparently haven't bothered to actually look up what some of these certs require. If you did you wouldn't have nearly the attitude that you do.
You need to evaluate any individual cert on it's own merits. Plain and simple.
An A+ cert? Garbage. Doesn't increase value of the resume. Why? Anybody can get one in 20 minutes using just their general knowledge.
A Cisco CCIE Cert? Absolute Gold. Increases the value of the resume by a factor of 3. Why? Because this guy has shown in a practical lab environment that he is a badass at configuring and troubleshooting Cisco equipment. Comparitively very few people get these and they are very tough to get. Google this one, you will see what I'm talking about.
Now, that being said, would you hire a CCIE for a coding job? Not unless he had some other evidence that he can code. Why? Because he has demonstrable skill in networking equipment but not necessarily swinging c++ around. If you had to set up a large scale WAN with multiple frame relays and a complex structure of VLANs, this would be your guy. If you want to write application software with complex object interaction and multiple abstraction layers... well, he probably doesn't know how to do that.
Basically, what I'm saying is that you can't make sweeping generalizations about these certs. You have to know a little about what the cert entails and you have to know how it relates to the job function you are filling. If you want someone to set up and maintain a linux server a RHCE would be an added plus to the resume not a minus and tossing this resume just 'cause it has a cert on it is really fricking dumb.
Maybe the cert isn't the whole picture of the candidate, you've got to consider the whole package, but to put someone out of the game who is probably very qualified for that reason is silly.
First off, I have quite a few certs - all but one from Microsoft. The other one is some BS Learning Tree "thanks-for-completing-our-course-pass-this-easy-t est-and-we'll-certify-you" certification... which brings me to my first point...
.NET. I haven't even been job searching since then. My company needs the certifications to retain Gold Partner status with Microsoft. If I leave they don't automatically lose it but if enough leave they will, which definitely would give them an incentive to keep me around in the case of company-wide-lay-off-x-people-because-thats-what-t he-accountant-says kind of scenarios (any other scenario, I believe I'm valuable enough that I don't have worry about it, certification or no). Plus, as a consultant, I like to think having the relevant certifications makes me a little more saleable. Which brings me to point number two...
1. Third part certication companies have a vested interest in certifying people (and selling more certifications). Vendors have a vested interest in producting quality knowledge workers.
So yeah, I have MCSD. For both visual studio 6 and
2. You don't have to be looking for a job for a certification to have value
Yes its true that a highly trained monkey could probably get that certification (with the right quasi-legal help). Its also true that if a highly trained monkey can get a certification and you have good cause to have the certification, then the only reason to not get it is that you believe the monkey is better than you. Or maybe you can't afford it. Points 3 and 4 coming up
3. By refusing to certify you risk the appearance of being perceived to be less skilled than someone who did certify. We all know really good test takers with about 30 certifications; you don't want to be perceived as less skilled than that guy, do you?
4. Get someone else to foot the bill whenever possible.
Ok how do you do that? If your employer isn't willing to do it directly, look into your training program; maybe you could forsake that conference this year to get certified? Point out that enterprise-wide levels of certifications sometimes get you elligibility into partnership programs with vendors that can lead to reduced licensing costs, as well as increased sales opportunities.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
I don't have any comment on the post you were replying to, but people do (indirectly) put their age, sex and possibly race on their resumes:
See, I don't agree with this, either. I have a two-page resume. I put the most relevant stuff on the front page (my experience and my contact information). Someday, I may have a three-page resume if I have enough good, relevant work experience. (No, there's no McDonald's on there now; it's all IT work.) But I still have a two-page resume.
Interestingly enough, I have a 100% company response rate to my recent (last year) resumes. It's because your resume is not what sells you: your cover letter is. A manager should never, ever be looking at your resume and deciding whether or not to bring you in for an interview: s/he should have already decided and be looking for contact information or details of a particular job you've mentioned. At this point, a one-page resume (assuming you have any real experience) just screws the process up.
I'm also a writer, and there's a maxim that holds true for resumes as well. Make the story [resume] just as long as it needs to be; no longer, no shorter. In my case, right now, that's two pages.
(And to those who will say, "But... but what about the people who reflexively bin resumes for being longer than one page, no matter what's in there?!"... do you really want to work for someone like that?)
Most bosses don't know what they want their employees to know.
How does a manager hire someone for a position whose requirements he's completely unfamiliar with? What questions does he ask? How does he know if the candidate really knows what they say?
That's what certification is.
It doesn't mean you know the information. It's just a way to allow the VP's to feel involved. They can handle acronyms on a resume. Hearing that you've spent 5 years working on (acronyms soup)... how do they validate that? They can ask you questions... but they don't know if your response is real... or just BS.
It's to keep the suits happy. That's all it is.
It would seem to me any employer looking to hire a prospective employee, must consider the costs associated with that hire. When we look at our paychecks, I'm sure most of us would say we're underpaid, whatever our industry. But whether a supermarket checkout clerk, or a Senior level Unix administrator, our salary != our cost of employment to our employer.
When you total in other factors such as vacation, sick, insurance (both medical for those that have it, and unemployment), Social Security Taxes, Medicare, and god knows what else, hiring somebody is an expensive proposition.
Would any reasonable hiring manager take on a person merely on the good faith that the individual states he qualified? Perhaps some do, but I'd hope most do not.
That said, some measure of 'proof' needs to be employed. No employer that i've ever had could claim to be sufficiently knowledgeable in IT so survive whatever BS I might throw at him in answering a technical question designed to demonstrate a measure of techincal compitance.
So, in that sense, IT certifications have the same effect (though at varying levels, depending on the hiring manager) as a college degree, a well defined employment record, or even a military background, or a personal recommendation from an existing employee or business associate.
All have the benifit of providing some level of confirmation that the individaul in question is qualified to perform the tasks in which he claims to be skilled.
Heck, my carreer field in the military matches my current position in IT about as well as Payne Stewert's pants and shirt, but what it *does* (or, hopefully should) demostrate is my ability to work under less-then-ideal circumstances, long hours, and my overall *ability* to be trained.
In some respect, IT certifications help demonstrate the same thing. Sure, I may be just luckey at taking tests, but a certification can reasonably demonstrate a level of compitance in IT better than that of the office receptionist.
Granted, any one can point out exceptions, but that still doesn't brake the rule.
When used in conjunction with other factors, an IT certification can help demonstrate to an employer just how qualified an individaul is. *That* I belive is the value of a certification. It is not the end-all, but mearly an means to that end.
Certification programs exist largely to commoditize platform-specific labor. They benefit vendors, such as Sun and Microsoft, that sell infrastructure technologies ("platforms") to large corporate clients. These vendors want to assure potential clients that their platforms are supported by legions of inexpensive, largely interchangeable laborers.
The certification programs are the means by which these assurances are made real. They define the minimal skill sets necessary to be considered competent in a particular platform. What makes the programs effective tools for driving down the cost of programming labor is that most certifications are easier for unskilled and offshore laborers to obtain than more traditional means of qualification, such as four-year degrees and on-the-job experience.
Whether certifications are good or bad depends on where you stand. If you don't have technical skills or experience and want to get into a market where certifications are prominent, go for the certification. On the other hand, if you have excellent skills and a track record that sets you apart, avoid markets where certification programs are rife because your abilities probably won't be appreciated. You should realize, however, that much of the work in the industry is going the way of commoditization, and it will be increasingly difficult to find corporate clients willing to pay much more than what the typical certification-holding employee is paid. For this reason, if you have the ability, you might want to start your own business or join a startup.
Easy, automatic testing for Perl.
Okay, this is getting off-topic, but as the spouse of an employer... It is certainly not illegal to have prejudice against an applicant. The only illegality would be not hiring them because of specific age and racial characterisitics. Geez, with all the self-appointed legal experts on this site I sometimes wonder if Slashdot is trying to be the next Groklaw.
{ - Generic Guy - }
In other words, is it any good?
It took me 4 months to get my alma mater to update their computer system to reflect that I had graduated 7 years previously. Of course, the fact they had sent me a diploma didn't seem to be a factor, but lots of employers want a transcript, and it didn't show up there. Of course, they didn't keep paper records that long, so all they had t go on was one field in a computer system.
... even if it's 4+ years and many thousands of dollars. (in the case of Brainbench, however, my company paid for me to take the tests, but I'd have to shell out for the paper to show I passed them, which can add up, if you do well at tests.)
In the end, after threatening to bring in lawyers, and having to get the curriculum committee to meet and decide I had passed, the dean finally apologized -- for having 'incorrectly given me a diploma'.
Besides, all that certificates prove is that you're willing to waste the time and money to get a piece of paper
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
You've established what certs don't do. They don't garuntee knowledge of a subject.
.com bust). My current job as a .Net developer went in against over 250.
But the do do 2 things.(err, grammer police, please help!)
1) Show that a person has enough desire to study/pay for a test, or drop a substantial amount of money on the topic for training. That shows some level of dedication.
2) Looks good on paper. When you send your resume in for that perfect job, along with the other 600+ resumes the HR people get, they need to quickly widdle the list down. Toss the poor formats right away. Toss anything that doesn't ahve a college degree next. Toss anything with out work experience. So they get it down to a list of 40 or so. What makes you stick out at that time? multiple years of related experience, extra training, certs, education, etc. Out of those 400+ resumes, only 3 are going to get a 1st run interview. If they all bomb another 3 may be called in. But all in all you need to get your resume in that top five, and certs can definately help.
Of the last two jobs I've had, one as a VB 6 developer with 5 years experience went into the fray against 600 resumes(Post
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Would I hire a person that never had a job in the field, just because he was MCSE? No
Would I hire a guy that had several years experience admining an MS network? Possibly.
Would I hire a guy that that had several years experience, and the MCSE? Almost certainly, and he'd get paid more than the guy above.
I can't stand people that only know how to use tools, and don't understand the basics of networking. I also can't stand all theory, and no knowledge of tools. I want both in my employees.
The failing of any testing methodology is that it may do a fair job of testing factual knowledge, but not PRACTICAL knowledge. This goes for certification testing and a lot of formal education. That said, I still think certification exams have their place. For the young and inexperienced, they indicate a willingness to develop professionally, and that they have at least SOME knowledge. And even for an older guy like me, I find I learn valuable information in the course of studying. It's certainly cheaper than going back to school for an BSc in Comp Sci. If I were hiring, I'd NEVER consider certifications in the absence of anything else. I don't just want to know what a candidate knows, I want to know how he (or she) THINKS. This is much trickier to determine, but communication skills count for a lot.
Of course certifications are worthless... as worthless as the bosses who hire employees on that sole reason. But you've got to remember being in the IT field that bosses have relatively litte information to go on... all they know is that the person needs to know a certian technology... the certification "proves" that to them. It does not prove it to me or you, but then again we don't have the money. You know the saying "money talks..." I personally don't have any certifications but I work for IBM where it's pretty much common knowledge that they are worthless. Know the knowledge first... *then* get a cert if worse comes to worse.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
The trick really is, if you are an employed, you get no benefit from having an employee certified. Maybe they learn something by studying for it, but more than likely they should learn just from doing their job, and you don't need to hand them an addition few hundred dollars to have Microsoft or CompTiA say "Nice job buddy!" It doesnt make them any better at their current job, when in fact all it does it make them more desireable at other positions, at other companies. That being said, if your employer will pay for ceritifications, eat it up. Take them, as much as possible, especially if the testing center isn't far, and they don't care if you pass the first time. My current employer pays for mine, and I feel a little guilty, but it's something to do, and I'm young enough yet where I need this to move on, because the experience I'm getting now is doubly as good if it shows I am still learning, and getting certified on the side.
we have recently hired two people with masters degrees and let them go because they cant do squat. that said i am working on my bachelors/masters since i have run into too many people who dismiss me for not having a college diploma. let me mention that college is a game. it goes both ways, but the majority of people -clients- still look for the sheep skin.
always mosh clockwise
I can guarantee you that your view will be at least slightly biased against certs if you don't have one vs. if you do have one, since by acknowlegding that someone with a cert might be more qualified isn't in a non-certified persons best interest.
I don't suppose you have the courage to say the name of your organization. That way you can save your time and the time of all those over educated over achievers out their?
Times like this I'm glad I got out of IT. Cert's on the whole aren't bad. If anything it shoes motivation and a desire to learn. Kind of like a degree which as someone else said are kind of the same.
Just curious what do you think about certifications in other fields, like ASE certified mechanics?
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
I'm glad you made that point for me, because I was going to call bunk on the "no longer than one page" thing.
Mine is one page at the moment, but that is due to a couple of things - I've only held two positions at this point, and I actually compressed and edited a few things out because it would have been a page and maybe 5 lines on the second page (which just looked silly to me).
I have had a fairly high call-in rate for interviews as well. Unfortunately, most of them have turned out to be psychotic or we decided that we weren't the best fit for each other, so I'm still looking.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
I have to share this story with the masses. I was a sysadmin or a small company (400users) and we had another admin like myself. We handled the wan setups, the 25 or so servers and things were fine... I took the WAN setup/config and was out in the field quite a bit and the other guy (being a lazy sob) decided he wanted to hire an entry level person to handle the simple stuff... We brought a girl in from AP and she was okay... She got this idea she would study for her MCSE and then leave in 12-18 months.. I just said go for it... About 6 months into her working in our group she did indeed take the tests and passed the suite of MCSE tests and was happy as a lark... We had a CxO level person who was having problems iwth outlook and the patch involved rebooting to safe mode and copying a .exe from a floppy to the laptop and running the fix/patch from there and rebooting....
She left with teh floppy i gave her around 3pm... I made my rounds around 4:30 and she was still sitting at his desk and did not know how to use the DOS command line to copy a:\fix.exe c:\
i just gave her a little nudge in teh right direction and on the command syntax and all worked fine.. so a 10 minute task hd taken nearly 2 hours...
I do have my certs on NT 3.51 and have not updated them... I really see the certs as an okay way to document your training but to certify you as 'ready' they fall WAY short...
my .02
sig goes here!
Well, let's just say it was the final straw for that particular resume. It came off as childish and pinball sealed the deal. The "deal" being its trip to the recycle bin.
I had visions of this person showing up on the first day with a box full of action figures to decorate their work space.
I have 15 years of networking experience, including Novell 3-6, NT 3.51-4, Win2k and 2k3, and a solid smattering of linux. I also happen to teach continuing ed IT classes for folks trying to switch into an IT career -- mostly A+/Net+, but also MCSA/MCSE.
I currently manage a 26-site WAN for an urban school district, with all the myriad of OS's and servers, as well as WAN troubleshooting.
But since I have an MCSE, I must not be qualified. Anyone who would ignore my resume because I took the time to get certs to match my field is someone who is too stupid to be worth working for.
If you have certs on your resume, it's because you don't have anything better to put there.
True enough. Which is why I want to see a balance of experience to go with the certs. Or sometimes the certs validate that you've extended your knowledge in a useful direction. If you've got a few years of relevant experience and you have a current certification, that says to me that you sought the paper credentials to validate what you can do. Of course, in the interview, I may well ask one or two easy questions pulled off a recent practice exam.
No, this isn't an ad. But I would like to mention that some companies will give you the training tools and let you take the tests for free.
Officeteam (a Robert Half company / Temp agency) offers free certifications. The only catch is if you fail, you have to wait a year to be able to retake the test (if you want to take it for free that is). I really wish I had taken the time to get a bunch of these completed while I was working for them, but I ended up getting a better job anyway and didn't need the certs after all.
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
I have do disagree with you on that one. I can tell someone wants to be in IT by the way they talk about IT and how up they are on what is happening in the feild. I think that everyone should be suspect of a person with certs but no experince and no stories to tell about an "uber hard" issue they solved. I think that most people who have been in the IT feild long enough have meet that guy who got his MCSE, has never been on a network in his life and yet wants to tell the people with expernice what it what and how their IT shop should be ran.
You only live once, so you might as well have fun before you die.
Certifications shift the risk away from the employer. If an employer hires a non-certified employee who doesn't work out, it's his neck. The person who hired that employee made a bad choice.
If they hire a certified employee who doesn't work out IE: Can't perform the tasks they're certified to do,- they or the certification authority didn't live up to their end of the bargain. It's no longer the fault of the hiring employee.
Also, it is assumed that a certified individual will have a minimum skills set that is available throughout the certified pool. IE: You'll have a pool of replacable trained monkeys to hire from.
On the lower end of the rung, you want this sort of replacability and consistency.
I hold the Cisco Network and Design Professional certifications as well as the wireless service and field engineer specializations. I'm one exam away from the Cisco Certified Internetwork Professional and one exam away from the Call Manager Express product specialization.
I like the certifications because its a way to incrementally approach the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert. You can roll your eyes about certifications all you want but there were 8,851 active CCIEs last time I looked and that cert still commands $100k+ here in the wilds of Nebraska.
If you work for a reseller Cisco makes it worth your while to be certified. My company gets an additional 7% discount on wireless gear because of my skills in the area. You can't even sell the Call Manager Express product until you have demonstrated that you have the skills to support it. Once you achieve Cisco Premier Partner Status
you can buy your Cisco toys for 70% off instead of the 50% that a basic Registered Partner gets.
There are a lot of certifications out there that are fairly meaningless (*COUGH* MCSE *COUGH*) but Cisco provides plenty of incentive for someone employed by a reseller to keep up their studies.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
If no law is being violated, you're only referring to a civil case. Any practice which does not violate the law and is applied uniformly can be defended in court.
A separate issue is your ability to manipulate a group of jurors to vote in your favor. If my lawyer is more compelling than yours, I could sue you for some made up reason and have a good chance at winning. That's a criticism of our juries, which has very little to do with the law.
I occaisionally interview for senior technical positions. If I saw "A+ Certified" on a resume, I would presume the person does not have enough experience. I've found too many people who hold that out as a qualification consider themselves experts. I'm interested in hiring the people that others consider experts. Of course, it would only be a negative if it were portrayed as a primary qualification.
Taking the time you spend getting certs and using it to schmooze and socialize with the higher-ups at your place of employment will get you contacts that are worth 1000x what any certification you can ever get. The old saying that it's not what you know, but who you know is true. If the people you know also know that you can get your job done there's nothing better to have in your arsenal of job finding tools.
When it comes time for a hiring manager to make a decision between the guy with the certs on his resume and the guy his golfing buddy (or whatever) says does a great job and is fun to hang out with, the golfing buddy recommendation will get the job every time. It's a lot more fun than paying to take some stupid test too.
.. I must say that someone claiming they have a cert in something relevant to the work-description gets more consideration than John Doe who merely states "yeah, we had classes about that in school".
In our job-ad, we specifically said "4 years of work-experience or relevant education".
So what's a relevant education?
If we're hiring a MySQL DBA (yeah yeah, insert whining about how mysql shops aren't in need of a DBA), the various mysql certs would help me quickly filter out what *should* be good applicants.
It might give you a chance to bypass the line of applicants and land you an interview, but unless I feel you're *socially* capable of working for our company, you don't get called to a second interview.
Iow, your cert(s) help me help you quicker.
Reading through 120 application letters isn't fun.
Well, this posting has generated a ton of heat and little light, so let me clue you-all in to my hiring procedure.
First: I own the company. I personally, with the aid of two assistants, control the entire screen-interview-hire process. There is an HR "gal" who handles things like tax withholding and reporting for four jurisdictions around the world, and making sure that your check comes on time, but she doesn't know a programmer from a dog catcher, so has no role in selecting candidates.
Second: Your resume is actually the last thing I look at.
The screening process goes like this: You are asked to send in a cover letter and code sample. Specific file-format requirements are posted with the job requisition. The last time I advertised, there were 1,266 responses.
The vast majority of applicants get the no-interview decision made based on failing to follow the application procedure. This is mostly to weed out robots and head-hunters, although discarding people who cannot follow simple instructions is a side benefit.
Of the one in twenty that successfully gets his letter into my hands, over half are discarded as incapable of effective communication in English.
Of the roughly 2% who have made it this far, we actually have to read some of their code and accompanying documentation. Since there are some systems (java at the lead) that I am not an expert in, I delegate the code review to other programmers in my organization. Here we are looking for consistency of style, and most of all efficacy of documentation. About half of the applicants at this point pass on to the next step.
Now, a telephone inteview takes place - since very few of us are on the same continent, your ability to communicate via telephone is of high importance. This is the "what is it going to be like to work with this guy/gal?" on a personality level call. Do you have a sense of humor? Can you form cogent sentences extemporaneously? The first passes have eliminated the chum, and about three out of five make it past this point.
Now, we begin the fact-checking phase - this is where your resume comes out of the file - first all of your references will be contacted. A few 'sneaky' techniques are used to help weed out shills - or, if you prefer, a complex heuristic analysis is used to determine the likelihood of dishonest response. You will probably not be surprised how many people I have caught trying to bullshit their way through this part. If you are not honest applying for the position, you likely will not be honest reporting your billable hours. This is where my anti-certification bias gets applied, but it turns out that it never seems to matter, because very few of the candidates that make it to this stage have certs. Curious, eh?
Now begins the Fun Stuff - which we actually pay you for. You will submit a writing sample -- this is almost always of the form "Here is a library in system-you-say-you-know. Imagine the programer got hit by a train. You have to document it." You will submit more code -- something that should take about one good day of coding for a modest coder. You are expected to give a log of how long you worked on it, what test procedures you used, what bugs you had (and hopefully fixed) , what was harder than it seemed at first, and what was easier than it seemed at first. From that pool (in the last batch of 1,266 responses, seven got to the paid-code/writing-sample stage) we select the best candidate. Two of those were hired -- a twenty-year veteran, and a self-taught high-school dropout.
Anyway - I have to go do some "real" work
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
This is an age old argument. Education -vs- experience.
You could go out and learn it all on your own. You could. But then again maybe you could't. It is pretty easy to miss something. But it is not like schooling and certs cover anything either. But why kill yourself trying to reinvent the learning wheel? But don't think that just because you have read a prep book and passed a cert that you are now "ready" and "knowledgable". You have now passed the 101 class.
Be careful. A person who has passed several certs, yet has no expereince, is about as useful as someone who is a genious but has no skill; they can think through it but they don't know how to get anything done.
College degrees prepare you even less. Any kind of degree or certification is useless on its own. But when combined with experience, it begins to gain meaning. The cert may help you get some jobs. But if you want to keep it, you had better have the knowhow to back it. Reality is expereince counts more than anything in most IT related fields. Certs are just eye candy for non-techie hiring managers. Of course there are those hiring managers that say, "if they have a cert I will not hire". Ignore them. They are rare. There are more that like certs than hate them. Also, if a manager is so close minded, you don't want to work for them anyway. Your life would be miserable.
The IT field is full of catch 22s. You need expereience to get the job. Well, then, where do I get the experience? Just like college, certs offer you a way to get in at the ground level so you can start getting expereience.
There are two reasons I have done certs:
1. Non-techie managers who need something other than my word that I am good at what I do. What they really don't know is my cert still does not say I can do it. But my experience does.
2. To push myself to new levels both in learning and employment. I want to know. The cert preparation process pushes me to learn things I would not have otherwise. I learn things that I would have looked the other way on because they were not interesting. That is a good thing. I learn things that would have taken years to learn by experience.
The best time to get a certification is after you have some experience. Then the cert preparation process will push you to new levels. If you have no experience you will spend most of your time learning the basics. You won't get much out of it.
Many who have experience only find they still have to study for the certs because they require you to know detailed knowledge about the topic that you do not use regularly. These people commonly say things like I don't need to know that. But after you have learned that detailed stuff, you all of the sudden realize there is a lot of application for it.
The bottom line is companies like to see degrees and certs. We all know that just because you have some paper, it does not proove you know anything. But by having both cert and experience, you cover both areas.
Don't expect a pay raise from the company you currently work for after passing the test. You will get that from your next employer. Over the past year I have increased my income by large amounts by combining certifications, study and experience to back the cert.
So should you get a cert? Well that depends on you.
Do you have experience already? If so you don't really need a cert, but having one won't hurt you. It will only help you. It is your choice wither you put it on your resume or not. There is a good chance though that if you get an advanced cert in the field you are now expereinced, in your next job, you will get to specialize more and get paid more.
No experience? Get a cert. Get some experience. Work your fannie off. Get another cert. Get more experience. Work your way up. If you can't get a job that will give you expereience, start getting creative and come up with your own ways to get it.
Please, sir tell me where is it you "act" as a hiring manager? I definitly will be sure not to apply to your organization.
It's one thing to drop resumes for lack of experience and proof thereof; it's another to drop them for too much.
You, sir, are an ass, and I can imagine that you have quite the turnover rate at your place of business. Oh, and yes, I modded you down. Twice. Care to make it a third time? Keep running your arrogant mouth...
I've tried to read the comments in this thread, however... Mostly, hiring appears to really coming down to image. It is the age-old tendency for first impressions to count - therefore your image is the first thing that affects you in any hiring position. I do not consider myself good looking - I'm a fairly typical overweight geek. I sit behind a desk doing my job most of the time. However, when it came to applying for my last job, I had to look towards my image. This meant what I wear, how often I bathe, my RESUME. What do Certs do for you? The employer gets to see your resume first. Any cert you have means that you have jumped through a few extra hoops to dress up your resume. You've taken the time, you've spent the money. You've made a decent first impression. If the hiring manager is worth his/her income, you will then get tested on those certs and degrees you have. If you don't get tested, then those certs & degrees are ALL YOU HAVE. Once again, image counts more than it should in society. College was explained to me (and I believe this) as a means to show you are capable or working through a task, learning new things, following a process, jumping through hoops, and finishing the task. That is why degrees matter to employers. Note that even though we go to college to get particular training (which may even be needed), the degree shows this much about you. Wouldn't any cert say the same thing? I've seen the CYOA (cover your own ass) rule - this applys. I've seen the 'You should test their knowledge' - this applys. I've seen the 'HR Filter' - this applys, especially as you geniuses who write HR software do logarithmic checks for statistically significant criteria. Are you willing to put up a good front for an employere? Are you willing to jump through a few hoops and finish a task? Is it worth your time to learn something new so that you can pass a test and get a piece of paper on the wall? Certs are only as useful as the image they project to the hiring manager. Hopefully the hiring manager will take more than just a snapshot, but as a person without certs in the IT field who kept getting turned down because I didn't have them (experience was NEVER mentioned).... well, I think they are a valuable piece of your image to a hiring manager.
do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
Uh, no it's not - certified people are not a protected class. I trash any resume with MENSA on it, for example.
This is a stupid way to think. Having a Cert doesn't make a candidate any worse than having a Cert makes them good.
A Cert, if nothing else, tells you the person WANTS to be in IT.
It's reality, and why you need to understand the hiring company and if possible, the hiring manager's needs and interets.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
They help find the Indian programmers who are at least capable of *reading* technical English.
As someone who graduated from high school two years ago, I can tell you that certifications are not everything. Although I have taken two years of Cisco Networking at Carson High School, I did not take the CCNA test at the end.
Because I really wanted to with computers and I wanted to help people, I worked for a non-profit organization that recycles and refurbishes computers for the community. I did not get paid much, but I had a place to live and I was happy. A year later, a local company made a presentation to us (ComputerCorps) and wanted to use us to beta test their products.
After they made their presentation, they saw the utilities I wrote and the projects I've. They offered me a job as a programmer on the spot before even asking me what certifications I have. After six months, I became that company's lead programmer and network administrator. I am also a part-owner of that company.
Although certifications are nice, they do not get you the job. They may get you in the door at some places, but determination and experience are the real factors that get you the job.
-steve
To justify blaming someone.
My resume is normally 5+ pages long. Admittedly my BEST stuff is on the first page, but with 20 years of experience, listing my accomplishments in small paragraphs is nearly impossible. Also technical resumes need to have lots of info about past projects and technologies to make it through the HR hurdle.
Certifications are almost manditory now for consulting and contract positions, especially with the government. If you don't have exactly what they want, you aren't even considered for the positions. You may think this is stupid, but it's how 'things get done'.
Unfortunately many of the people I have encountered are certified but not qualified. There are too many "boot" camps that cram too much into 5 days and then allow all the students to "collaborate" on the tests.
Slashdot - Where the slash is most definitely to the left.
Certification makes you a tradable good. Hence:
- Certification get you beyond HR/headhunter/unsavvy manager
- Certification gets you a job that requires that certificate
And sure, you may pick-up some info that may be interesting, or even useful. The main question is, however, why would you want to learn about / get into a market where *THOUSANDS* of souls could replace you? I understand the benefits for a company, but isn't the fun in *any* job in the stuff that's on the fringe of what you learned; on the edge of what you can do?
Personally, I'm wary of jobs that require some certificate because more often than not they really expect you to do the kind of mind bogging coding that you learned in the mind bogging certification course. I'm much more interested in companies that take the time to go through my resume to see that I apt for the job. If they need labels to judge me by, then why would I want to work there?
Or maybe his current job sent him for certification. Mine certainly has enough times.
Mod point free since 2001
I'm sure that a lot of other people have put in this reply but, I slowly got a working knowlege of computers and eventually got a position in the IT field as a network admin. I eventually got my MCSE and got a considerable raise because of this. So I DO think that the certs are valuable. Up to a point...
and a college degree even more so, is that the individual has the emotional maturity to realize self-set goals and achievements.
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
As "Certified Technician" is not a protected class under U.S equal employment opportunity laws, U.S. employers can discriminate against job applicants on that basis all day long.
And if you check his profile, you will see that YankeeInExile lives in Mexico, where I'm guessing the legal requirements are even more relaxed.
Wow... I only had to work for ten years to be a "seasoned vet?"
Lets see...168 hours in a week, 40 for work
40 hours for work? Where?
I vaguely remember working 40 hours a week between my freshman and sophomore year in high school at McDonalds. Since then it's been 60-80... I guess I've known people at the companies I've worked for that put in 40 hours, but I don't recall having a very good impression of the level of effort they put into their jobs even when they were in the building.
As you don't say which one it is, your argument is meaningless
The previous poster was making a point that whoever it was that made the assertion that what they were doing was illegal, was full of crap. The reason for that was because they don't know if this person is doing hiring in the U.S., Uzbekistan, or on the freaking moon. In any case, I don't know of any location where it is illegal to not hire people based upon their certifications. Can you name one?
you're underqualified for your job
I see following up on making an uninformed assertion without all the facts by making yet another. Sheer genius.
Personally, I can understand why people would get certifications for resume fodder, to fulfill work requirements or contract requirements, or just because they wanted to learn something new and thought they might as well have some documentation of that. At the same time, however, I can see this guy's point. If a potential employee has been spending their time getting certified in things that is that much less time they have been spending getting real work experience. It also shows a tendency towards fitting in with a bureaucracy and "playing the game." That may be exactly the kind of people who are not useful to him in whatever environment he is hiring.
I personally work with dozens of people with no pertinent degrees or certifications working side by side with PhD's who spent a decade teaching this stuff at a university. There are still others that have a couple dozen certificates from various companies. Certs, education, experience, are all pretty incidental. What counts is demonstrating you can do the job and do it well. What works here, however, would not work everywhere. In some places certs are a plus, in others a minus.
There are two reasons:
Yes, both are debatable.
I received the Red Hat Certified Engineer certification last year. My reasoning was that I was employeed and saving money, so I might as well get a certification in case I ever lose my job. The last time I lost my job my lack of certification was an issue with some employers. This was a flaw in their reasoning; wiser employers won't care as much about certificates. But when you're looking for a job it's worth seeming qualified to the HR people who can open doors to people more qualified to evaluate your skills. So certification is an insurance policy.
In the process of studying for what was a very challenging test (which I failed on the first attempt), I learned a little bit about more or less everything in an average Red Hat Linux system. The studying itself was a lot of work, and I really valued the knowledge that came of it. I requested and received a raise in my sysadmin job, since I was a more valuable employee after I studied for the RHCE. This may vary from cert to cert (I've run circles around MCSEs when consulting for Microsoft products). But in my case the studying was valuable.
Of course I could have studied the course materials without taking the test, and I'm sure that would be fine for many people. But I liked the idea of having the insurance policy, and the test provided a nice goal.
You don't think someone might have attended college to find a place where they are surrounded by peers who are actually interested in learning and can completely submerge themselves in a topic. Where they can talk about the concepts they are learning and more fully flesh out their understanding. Oh, yeah, and attend some classes, have free reign at massive libraries focused on the topic of interest and have access to equipment and labs that no lone 'self taught' student could ever hope to afford.
Oh ok.. thats understandable. As I would be personally intrigued by an otherwise mature individual who was devoted to pinball.
Geez, and this just after blowing $220 on that "A+" cert this weekend. Thanks a lot, agent at a staffing firm whose name I can't recall! (They said it'd make me easier to market. Sheesh.)
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Learning and doing new things is important. I would consider this an interview topic. Whether the individual is self-taught or takes courses is up to the individual.
I strongly disagree with your assertion that the quality of the course is not as important. I'd seriously question the judgement of someone who was more interested in being able to say they completed a course than developed proficiency in a new skill.
You ignorant, arrogant ass. What if I came and applied for a position with your company. Let's say you had something open for which I fit well... I'll just say, Storage and Backup administrator. My resume is four pages long, because I've been with a consulting company who sends me out to clients to configure SANs, storage arrays, backup solutions, and outside-the-box solutions crossing all the disciplines, from system to tape and in between.
I'm sorry though, because my company paid for me to train for this and I ended up with more than 8 certs with several vendors, including the performance-based RHCE. I worked my ass off studying for and taking those exams and I learned a hell of a lot. But now you have to put my resume in the trash.
Congratulations... oh, not you, to the next company who actually values and recognizes experience and doesn't balk at the pieces of paper that come with it.
Well for some reason this stupid forum system lost my last post. It was detailed and had a great deal of insite into this issue. But I am lazy and don't belive in pandering to technical idiocy, so I will NOT retype pages of text. I made my feelings known in an artical for the BSD certification list. Here is the link. Comments are welcome. http://lists.nycbug.org/pipermail/bsdcert/2005-Apr il/000338.html
It wasn't the 4 years of college. It wasn't the 3 years managing an ISP staff of 40.
It was that silly A+ Cert on my resume I have to thank for my current career.
After coming aboard, the manager leveled with me. It was his belief that obtaining a cert showed more drive and determination than a college degree. He said "You had to actually decide that you were going to get certified, and take the initiative and steps necessary to comeplete both the studying, and the subsequent test/tests and that, to me, is worth more than someone staying in school for four more years."
The more I thought about it the more fault I found in that, but the point is that there are managers out there who still give certs, or at least the process of obtaining one, significant weight in the hiring process.
I find that certifications give me a goal and a learning path to follow. In my job, I may never explore some of the areas that I encounter while studying for a cert.
So for me, certifications are just an additional motivator for improving my knowledge and skill. After I've learned everything, I might as well get the little piece of paper that says I know something about the topic. I don't see how it can possibly hurt to have a certification, other than the cost.
Does anybody here remember BrainBench when they offered their tests for free and with free paper certs sent to you if you passed, or passed at master-level ?
:)
I was fresh out of highschool and got around 40 of those certs, 20 of which at master level, one of which, in their ranking system, in the top 10 of all takers (Internet Security Specialist, I like that one
It was a fun way to pass a few hours. Getting a perfect score was near impossible (the test adapted; get an answer right, and you get a harder question next time), but passing was doable. I now have a stack of those certs printed on nice paper, a few with the golden master star in a folder somewhere.
My point is that, while some of them correctly assessed my proficiency in some sectors (Perl, TCP/IP, Unix, etc., at least that's what I thought), others I had absolutely no prior experience in (Telecommunication Industry Analyst, Microsoft Office Worker, some obscure programming language) incorrectly passed me as well, sometimes at master level. This is with no prior work, just using common sense, and at times, Google (which was explicitly allowed).
Some time later, I took the LPI Level 1 test (heck, company paid for it), and had a look at some of the MSCE prep material and practice test (for the heck of it). The questions were not all that different, and considering you can't use Google on most of them, en par (i.e. easier).
Since then they have started charging for the tests, so I stopped having fun trying to pass new ones on first try. But one thing that stuck was that such certifications, barring very few exceptions, are completely worthless. All they test is whether or not you can soak up information on a topic for a test, or barring that, use Google and your own resources to figure out answers to questions. They don't test whether you can actually apply that knowledge, or whether it will last any amount of time.
An one-hour interview can tell you much more about a candidate than the alphabet soup ever will. If that candidate is like me he had some fun doing those tests. Hopefully.
I'm not saying someone with a cert is less experienced, just that it certaintly doesn't make them any better or more experienced than someone with a certificate - apart from they can afford to get one.
I truely understand your point about hitting the documents/google tho - its far more important to know how to find out things than to only know what you've been taught.
Thanks for your input Guice, I find this really interesting topic. Any manager worth their job should realise that certification isn't everything.
Dug
I think at some point there is a marginal return in the domain of book smarts vs. actual job experience. From what I have experienced, having at least a few Certs on the Rez can get your "foot in the door" not to mention a few good references. Also Certs seem to help if you are moving into a new tech space or a new technology because the curriculum or test requirements seem to set the backdrop for "the top ten or twenty things you need to know about this topic". However, what I look for when I interview people is a standard of domain knowledge, but also I try and suss out their ability to reason, their ability to involve others when they get stuck. Let's face it most of us geeks can google and probably configure some scary new technology in a few days but team fit and a personality that is easy to work with is the biggest piece bar none. Nice if somehow we could have a Cert for that. Good Question! Cheers!
It is possible that they often have good intentions (i.e. accepted standard of what a person likely knows without having to create ones own competency tests).
~ I am logged on, therefore I am.
The simple fact is that recruiters and HR folks look for keywords. Certification acronyms are a major part of them. While they hold no real technical merit, non-technical employees/companies don't know that.
Why do you list the MCSE on the second AND third lines?
I worked for a company and the guys responsible for hiring tech gave me their take on certifictions (<--NOT A TYPO): They are not worth the toilet paper they are printed on. EXCEPT a Cisco certification. A person actually had to know something to get one of those.
blarg.
Certifications were at one time useful. They provided proof that a person had professional knowledge of what he/she was certified on. Today, there are to many things out there that make certifications obsolete or just pointless. MCSE/Cisco/etc. "Boot Camps" provide a person with just enough knowledge to pass a test. If a company hired someone that never worked on an actual system before, but was able to take a test because of a boot camp...that company is in BIG trouble. And, this isn't just a fantasy scenario. I see it all the time. Resumes can be misleading, people lie, but that certification shows the person must know something...right? No. Test King, Boot Camps, etc. It's done to pass the test and get a cert. Now don't get me wrong, I've seen plenty of people that do know their stuff use boot camps or Test King to pass the test. They usually say it's becuase they don't take tests well. I myself do not have any certs. I am considered among the best of my co-workers (many of whom do have certs). My place of business will pay for the cert test if you pass, but you need to sign up for a minimum of one more year. I would rather have the good reputation and know that I can do the work better than most other people who have a peice of paper. Just my opinion though...
Certification is like a 3rd party one-way hash of what you know.
No, it's not really what you can do. No, it's not fair. But, yes, it's a convenient benchmark that time-harried, IT-novice bosses can use to see if they should spend their time even considering your job application.
Otherwise, it's useless.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I like Velamints myself.
/dev/floppy and tried to 'cd' into it. Didn't work, obviously. I did some searching and found out about this strange command called 'mount'. I got really pissed at what I percieved as needless complexity but I eventually jsut accepted it. That is a perfect example of doing something because I know I'm supposed to do it, but not knowing why. These days, I know why mount and umount are needed, I also know about autofs. In knowing the why (flat file system with no weird path kludges like Windows drive letters) my dealings are much more straightforward. This is something you can't learn from a book or class.
But seriously folks. In some of the better organizations, certification is likely to be a liability than an asset when your looking for a job. Any place where techs are doing the hiring instead of suits, you're going to find that they are really leary of people with certifications. A lot of people want to get into IT but just don't have the aptitude or background for it. So they go and work on their test taking skills and get certifications hoping it will be their big break. However, as soon as they're confronted with real technical problem domains, they can't cut it.
Working in IT and doing it well requires more than just book knowledge. It requires an actual understanding of WHY you do what you do. For example, I'll go back to my early Unix days. I had just come from Windows and I was used to "directly accessing" the floppy drive. When I popped a floppy into a Linux box and I was looknig at the a Bash prompt (no GUI) I knew I could do an 'ls'. But of what? I found a
Certs really are pointless unless you are trying to get hired into an IT dept. that is run by the suits instead of the techs. And that's always a nightmare. Techs run IT better than suits do.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
"For those already employed, it looks great on a performance review..."
hey, Slashdot should offer a certification
I used to do consulting. Customers liked to see certs. My employer paid for me to take each relevant exam once. If I passed, I got a automatic raise. It was simple economics since more certs for me = more billable hours, and a higher rate of personal pay and no out of pocket costs for exams since I could pass them all on the first try. If there was no economic incentive, I'd have never taken them, since I don't think they really mean anything other than I could take a silly test.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Before you consider certifications for software and IT professionals, think on this...
Say your mother or wife detects a lump on her breast, or you detect one on your testicle. How would you go about choosing an oncologist, radiologist, or surgeon? Would you let anyone who said they knew what they were doing treat you, or would you prefer some assurance of their training? Would you want a doc that's AMA Board Certified? Trained at the best schools? One that studied with the best teachers peers?
Or maybe you're building a house? Would you let an unlicensed architect or construction contractor build it?
The fact is that we are all judged by previous education, experience, and training. A certification is one piece of that. It helps you stand out from your peers. It also represents an assurance of skill and knowledge. In many cases, such as the PE, medical certs, etc. they include legal assurances and liabilities.
The question shouldn't be "why do we need these certs?", but how do we make certifications for computer science and IT that are as strong as other professional certifications for doctors, architects, civil/mechanical engineers, etc. No one should ever think that is just meaningless paper certification.
In the early 90's, certs were all the rage. Companies thought that if someone had a cert, they were automatically qualified. Oh, how they were burned.
Then in the late 90's, certs weren't worth the paper they were printed on, so regardless of how much you really knew or how much experience you had, if you had numerous certs the knee-jerk reaction was to pass you by.
Then and now the single path that has proven the most worthwhile for employees and employers is the combination of both: certification supported by experience, or experience confirmed by certifications. I'm of the latter crowd. I've been working on PCs and networks professionally since 1984. In 1997 I earned the CompTIA A+ (I took it on a whim while working towards MCSE NT 4.0) In June 2004 I attended a boot camp for two weeks and came away with four certs (MCP, MCSA, MCSE, Security +), then in December I earned my CCNA after a 5 day course. I'm not much smarter than I was before the courses, but people seem to think I am. :-)
My certs had no impact on my position or my salary, but if I decide to depart this company, I know I'll be greeted more warmly at the next one.
The main benefit of certs is similar to degrees.
It's a measure of tolerance of bullshit.
Most jobs don't need a genius. What they need is someone competent who won't cause trouble and be reasonable to work with. In other words what employers need more than genius is tolerance for bullshit.
Someone willing to jump through hoops to get a certificate is showing their tolerance for bullshit.
The certs don't test well enough. And the tests are too thorough in narrow areas. You really have to be a specialist in Cisco or Novell administration (or whatever).
We'll see how the glut of software engineers and off-shoring may be changing this.
I18N == Intergalacticization
BTW, regarding your .sig, most all slahdotters RTFA. It's mainly the one's who think their opinion is worth sharing that don't.
(Disclaimer: My experience with certifications has to do only with the Sun Java-related exams. I have no idea whether those certification exams/programs are typical.)
/. who think it's easy (particularly when you're constrained by upper management on how rigorous an interview process you can use, and multiple people have input on a given hire).
1. Even managers who have a clue might enjoy telling their clueless bosses "the candidate I hired has xxx certifications" as a way of establishing the new person's credibility or of justifying a hiring decision (perhaps a decision that violates the clueless uber-boss's prejudices, for example).
2. It goes without saying that there's no substitute for trying to figure out whether someone can actually do a job or not. But we have to use imperfect evidence. And remember, it's not as easy as being able to tell whether someone can code (which is hard enough). It's knowing their levels of dedication, responsibility, ability to work as part of team, etc. Hiring great people is a hard job; I disagree with those on
3. In the absence of perfect knowledge about candidates, we use all sorts of criteria to estimate quality. Given the alternatives (where did the person go to college? what was the person's GPA? where has the person worked? what are the opinions of the person's references (who I probably don't know and thus can't evaluate)? or, worst of all, how many years of experience does the person have?) I think whether the person can study for and pass a certification exam starts to look pretty good; not necessarily better than all of the previous examples, but on a par with them, in my view.
4. I have certifications. I would rather have people judge me on some sort of objective criteria, rather than how well I can talk my way through an interview. I've seen the average interview process. I'm more glib than most, and I know I could probably get myself hired for jobs for which I'm not qualified, given the processes used (whether I'd want to is another matter, but this comment is long enough).
While most of the IT certifications do not have any real value, there are still some that do. Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert is a perfect example. You have absolutely no chance of becoming a CCIE unless you're a real networking heavyweight. Besides, in order to maintain the level of the title, every two years all CCIEs are required to pass recertification exams. The paper and the medal (I've heard they don't award medals anymore, but I'm not sure; I did get one in 2000) are quite expensive, but they really are worth every penny invested.
Word.
I did the SCJP and it taught me alot about some nooks and crannies I never used. That may be different from an MCSE or MCSD in some regards. The SCJP has you learn a bunch about garbage collection, some nitty gritty JVM details, etc. Nothing you could not learn on your own. It is also the gateway test to the other Java exams. Some of those actually do indicate if you are a decent developer: the Sun Certified Java Developer exam requires you to develop a business type app NEARLY FROM SCRATCH (no J2EE, etc) and then they review your design as part of that process. That is alot different than just memorizing details.
But for the most part, certifications for a language do not mean you are a good developer, but if you really are good they should be like icing on the cake.
Now if you hate all people who have certifications (and ignore their resumes... like an earlier posts states), I think you might have some personal issues...
"Ooooh and I'll bet you have a huge hard drive." she says as she slips her hand inside my pants...
So you discard resumes that have "MCSE" on them. Another hiring manager might discard resumes that DON'T have "MCSE" on them. I'm sure that both of you are sitting there in your office quite smug about all the work you've just saved yourselves by discarding all those undesireable candidates. And both of you probably tossed out some really knowledgable, qualified candidates.
Certs are generally a litmus test. Have the right one, and some HR drone puts your resume on one stack, or your name pops up when someone does a relevant search on an Internet job site. If you don't have it, your resume goes on the other stack.
I suppose there's the occasional oddball who will look upon certs as a bad thing, but I'd say 95% of the companies out there look at certs positively, or at least neutrally.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
No, it means they have the money to afford to be in IT.
:-P
/gam/
So what. I paid a lot of money to get my CS degree.
Personally, I think this thread is stupid. I have a cert or two. I have put them on my resume, and at the least, they became a target for questions during interviews. Can I do the job? You bet. Can I prove it? You bet. Why would putting on my resume that I'm a certified CCSP mean I'm an idiot or unqualified? And why does paying for all the training to get it mean something bad? Hell, does anyone saying some of these negative comments even know what it takes to get some of these certs?
Now, having said all that, I personally believe there's a difference between having a cert or two in one area and having a butt load of certs in disparate areas. For instance, having a CCSP *and* an MCSE would be a red flag to me if I was hiring. Two totally different fields of study? How good could they be in either? Open your eyes, people, and look at what's being given to you. Don't just make snappy decisions based on an illegitamate premise. You end up missing out on good people, like me.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
...who has them. This is something I'm somewhat familiar with as well. I've been in the industry (first as a programmer then gradually migrated to hardware and general support) since about 1990. I don't have a single certification, hell I don't even have a degree above an associates. I have met/know a few certified individuals, most of which are fairly sharp. Still I have met a number who had the paper, but were complete dunderheads. What value is a certification if the occasional moron slips through?
I can honestly say that the lack of degree and certs has never been a barrier for me personally, with a single exception. A company advertised two positions, one of which (by the description) was a front line IT support position, and they were asking for an MCSE. The second (again by the description), was primarily a data entry job and they were asking for an MCP (this was a while back). HR would not even accept applications without proof of a cert, though they confirmed my assessment of each job. So management/HR was asking an arbitrary proof without understanding the certs or the job. Where is the value in that?
I currently work at a University, which had a fairly gruelling application/interview process. Why did I get hired? Because the other ITs in the department did the screening and interviews. They were able to accurately assess my capabilities without some third party test.
Bottom line, in my opinion, is that certs/degrees hold little sway with IT peers and tech savvy managers. It's only those who are ignorant of our field that see value in it. They are Fools Gold.
Just because someone wants to be in IT doesn't mean they should. I've come across plenty of certified people who were NOT qualified. They were in it for the money and they were terrible at what they did.
for people who have not networked (no, I don't mean computer networking)!
The best way to ensure job security is to make friends and get to know people in higher positions than yourself (that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to kiss some ass, but it probably wouldn't hurt).
I don't have any certifications yet I work for a multi-national firm simply because I have friends who know me and have seen my skills. Often times people with lesser qualifying skills get a job over others simply because someone in the firm recommends them, regardless of their certifications.
So all you fresh grands and no-grads out there start networking!
Seems like Mike's Computer Sertification E-company might be more profitable name to use.
I go to a local community college (ok, stop laughing) and you can bypass some courses by having a cert. I am going to be able to bypass 8 credits by getting my Network+. As a part time student and a full time worker this will help make the difference on how fast I get my degree and the cert on my resume can't do much harm.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
A while back I met a n00b in the IT world, who had passed both A+ and MCSE exams without ever touching a computer. He was West Indian and had purchased books from a local store, studied hard, and passed, again, without ever touching a computer before he got to the US.
"Ain't I a stinka..." - Bugs
Showing what you can do! Certifications are one step ahead of degrees. They certify people on specific skills, whereas degrees establish a foundation of your knowledge, so to speak. And despite what you seem to say, you *will* fail at a decent certification test if you don't know what you're talking about. One can't be just "good at tests". That's a rather stupid assertion. Medical schools make heavy use of multiple choice-tests to evaluate students, and if that was easy to pass without any medical knowledge, we certainly would know about it. Also, any good certification program will be much, much more thorough than any job interview can be: so that's a big help too for a potential employer. Just because there are a few people out there that are good without having any degree or certification (yes, that exists) doesn't mean that certifications are useless. That was basically your main point, and it's obviously very flawed logic.
Like most things in this world, general statements aren't going to cut it. The statement that "there is no point in getting certifications ..." is correct in some situations, and decidedly incorrect in others. Some certifications are a bit more meaningful then others, surely this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone. The idea that an A+ certification and a CCIE certifcation are equally worthless is crazy. Do you have any idea what it takes to get a CCIE? I guess what I'm saying is that this is not a simple question, some certifications are worth while, some are not.
... yes, certifications are worth while. Some are certainly worth more while then others, and some are arguable worthless, but certifications, in general, are worth while.
Another point that people may not realize is that there are a lot of jobs that require certifications. For example, good luck signing off on any sort of opinion if you are not a CPA. Is the CPA useless? I don't think so. Another example, Visa is now requiring card processors do undergo an accreditation process. This process includes having a certified vendor perform a Visa audit. Guess what, you can *not* perform that Visa audit until you have received Visa training. You know what else? You can *not* receive Visa training unless you have one of a handful of certifications, including the CISSP and CISA certifications. Not convinced? Let's move on.
There is yet another reason that certifications serve some purpose. They are a statement on at least some level of the competence of an individual. Yes, I know that there are some losers with certifications that are not competent, but think of this from a different light. You are a manager tasked with hiring a person (or company) to perform services for you. Think of how you are going to look if this person or company fails, and hurts your company as a result. At that point, being the one that made the decision, are you going to want to have chosen someone who (however shallow it may be) had some form of legitimacy? I can guarantee that your "certifications are worthless" argument is going to sound a bit feeble when explaining the failure of the project to your boss. If you are a candidate for a job, and on paper and through interviews you are relatively equal, but he has the appropriate certifications and you do not, guess who is going to get the job. This is a particularly true if you are hiring for a position that you yourself are not particularly proficient at.
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume. Are you kidding me? "Yes, Sir, I know that our latest Network Administrator, the one that I hired, has cost us thousands due to incompetence, but see, they were the only one *without* their MCSE, so it's not like I had much of a choice." Good luck with that.
So in conclusion,
The fact that you don't know how to spell irritate irates me.
No comment.
You've proved exactly my point! Just because someone has an CNE, it literally means they've passed the cert. Without even having a clue about NDS, i could tell you they're I don't discrimate against Certificates, I simply feel they're almost worthless, proof of knowledge for a job should be shown by good interview technique and testing. Certification is good, but it certaintly doesn't mean one candiate is better than one without certification. I certaintly would refuse to work for any manager who I knew thought otherwise. Dug
Or, maybe, they got the certification because a current or previous employer required (and paid for) it so that the employer could fulfill a contract requirement, or help them win a bid with someone who placed more stock in them than you do. If an employer tells me "take this test at our expense, it'll help us stay in business", and I do (and pass), how exactly is that opportunism?
Well sorta. Depends on the individual I'd say. Someone who has taken one of those courses in good faith not knowing any better (since not everyone reads /.) and who is willing to give up their spare time in an attempt to improve is surely not someone you'd think any less of.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
I disagree regarding college degrees. In my experience, there are many things you can learn in college that you probably wouldn't even think about studying on your own -- especially theoretical principles (design) of a variety of fields as opposed to specific applications (coding). Some of the more difficult studies are also easier to deal with if you can confer with professors and other students.
In addition to the subject matter, colleges can provide you with resources and equipment that would be impossible or impractical to obtain on your own. That may not be as much of an issue today, with cheaper and more powerful computers and oodles of information on the Internet, but before I went to college I had never had a VAX or SGI workstation to play with.
Compare two resumes.
One has:
MCSE Win2000
MCSE WinXP
MCSE Win2003
The other has:
MCSE Win2000
RHCE
CCNA
The same number of certs but they reflect completely different people and they tell you a lot about those people. And studying to pass a cert test can teach you things that you would never happen across in your regular job. I fully support anyone spending time and learning more about their field and related fields. Anyone who sees advancing your education as a problem is an idiot.
First off, a college degree in CS is not about learning "how to program", it is learning about learning how to think in the mind set of computers.
You can spend five or six years studying on your own (and good luck funding five years of sixteen hours a day of studying!), with no guidance at all, but there are many things you may miss. Tell me, how much have you studied formal logic? Advanced mathematics? Music? Color theory? What is the weirdest data structure you ever implemented? (sure some people implement odd data structure for fun, but when you are getting a CS degree you will be forced to implement a wide variety of weird data structure, again and again and again! Until you have them, and their relative performance characteristics, not just memorized, but understood completely)
Secondly, computer science IS mostly a self-motivated discipline, much more so than other majors.
Heck, at my University, the second quarter there, you get thrown a 3D ray tracing assignment. The professor doesn't actually LECTURE about 3D ray tracing, he just tells you to write one.
The first portion of it (a simple line based renderer) is due in 2 weeks. Now it can take far less time than that, or a bit more, depending on how good you are at learning on your own, but you know what? Students who are not good self-motivated learners FAIL that course. And if they fail any one of the introductory courses 3 times, they are denied entrance into the major, permanently. Now giving students three chances to fail may seem like a lot, until you realize that during the THIRD quarter there you are writing a networked battle tank game. Network sockets, streams, and so forth, are not explained to you. You just get to, well, you know, "pick them up" along the way.
You live, breath, and sleep, computer science, mathematics, and logic. Your mind begins to easily wrap itself around the most abstract and obtuse of problems, you learn how to push your abilities of comprehension to limits that you never knew you had.
This is an obvious statement.
Go to one of my classes, see what it is like when the professor writes the name of the programming language you will be using up on the board, and tells you that your first assignment is due in 2 weeks.
Someone asks "are we missing a book for this class?" The professor replies "No, use Google."
I have not even began to go in to depth about all the other benefits that a college education gives someone. From a greater understanding of both one's own nation's history, and world history as a whole, to insight into various cultures and groups world wide. From having math taught by professors from all corners of the globe (and trust me, math may be a global language, but how it is interpreted, and understood, in different cultures varies a lot!), to organizing a study group with no two students from the same continent, because you have learned that the different perspectives will enable solving of problems much faster.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Well I have run into both sides of the argument.
When I finally obtained my first degree I was asked to take a 20% pay cut to be employed as a Software engineer. The work was the same as I was already writing software (assembler, compiler, loader, drivers etc). But I was employed as a hardware technician and also assembling, testing and debugging boards.
Another contract I ended up with was solely because I had a Master of Science in computer science. A pure research degree. I joined a team that was very high powered. Alas a dotcom that went into liquidation. Sigh!
I am now finding that I shouldn't mention the current postgraduate degree I'm studying as it does seem to concern Management. It is in Master of Philosphy in Ancient History.
Also I get the occasional bad reaction to having the MSc and thus I have a very strong tendency to play it all by ear. If it looks like it might help then mention the degrees otherwise keep my mouth SHUT.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
Weighting candidates for a job by their qualifications is illegal? ROFL!
--paulj
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Yeah, you are sooo right. College is for idiots, and mindless drones, who need to be spoonfed everything, and can't be trusted to do anything independently.
Yeah, I've heard of some of those fools, like Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Linus Torvalds, Richard Feynman, Andrew Tannenbaum, Richard Stevens, Al Aho, Richard Stallings, Aeleen Frisch...
(unless you're talking about IT degrees specifically. I might be with you on that one).
You've proved exactly my point! Just because someone has an CNE, it literally means they've passed the cert.
Without even having a clue about NDS, i know I could be just as informed about it than another person with full qualifications - Whats to say any other way? That I can't afford to pay Novell their $369?
So, maybe I'm a manager and my higher-ups have asked me to be qualified? Maybe I didn't want to, but for the job, I've not had a choiec. So, I've taken the course, got my paper, and forgotten everything about NDS. Yes, IT DOES HAPPEN - because my manager was in this exact suituation.
The fact that she was a bitch and didn't have a clue about computers didn't help. Btw, I'm no manager, just a loly poor programmer hoping to get his break soon - but I can't afford $369! Does that make me any less experienced than someone who can?
I don't discrimate against Certificates, I simply feel they're almost worthless, proof of knowledge for a job should be shown by good interview technique and testing.
Certification is good, but it certaintly doesn't mean one candiate is better than one without certification. I certaintly would refuse to work for any manager who I knew thought otherwise.
Dug
I believe my certs helped me get my current job. While I agree with others that certs don't prove you know what you are doing, they can at least get you looked at seriously enough to get an interview. It's the interview that usually is going to make or break the decision by the employer.
I was in the situation where I know a lot about computers, but don't have a good way to show that on a resume. I was a college student, who excelled at my computer science courses (but you don't usually put that on your resume - although I suppose you could), and had a few years of lower-level computer support/helpdesk work experience.
My current job listed Linux/Unix experience as a desired skillset. I have been using Linux at home as a geek, and as a computer science student, for about oh, 6 years all together, but had never had a Linux/Unix job. There would otherwise be nothing on my resume to indicate that I actually knew how to use and configure Linux. So, I got the Linux Professional Instituge level 1 Certification. Sure, that doesn't necessarily prove that I'm ready to be a Linux administrator, but it at least shows I was serious enough about learning and using Linux to go out and pass a test about it. (In this particular case, I'm not a Linux administrator, but have a higher-level helpdesk job than I have had in the past, and supporting Linux is a part of this position - and to tell the truth, I know a lot more about Linux than some of the 'administrators' I support pretty frequently).
It got me an interview, and in the interview I had the chance to explain my background and experience with Linux, and demonstrate my proficiency to the department manage, who was satisfied, and hired me.
For people who already have years of experience and a degree under their belt, they can probably skip getting certs. For people just starting out, it's a great way to get your foot in the door.
But a BA/BS/MA/MS/etc. is not supposed to be about proving that you know a certain body of knowledge. It's supposed to prove that you know how to educate yourself and that you understand deeply the fundamental principles behind a discipline.
/gam/
Let me guess, you've never worked with an idiot that had a degree before. Degree's are potentially just as meaningless (or valuable, depending) as certs. I know some of my classmates were absolutely awful coders, yet they still received their CS degree and found programmer positions.
My point is this: if you can't figure out if a candidate can do the job during the interview, perhaps there's a bigger problem here than having a cert on your resume.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
> Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
That's a good plan, because it isn't. There are laws about discriminating on the basis of race, sex, and religion, and in some places, sexual preference. There are no laws about discriminating on the basis of certifications. Indeed, such a law would hardly make sense, as the certification companies want you to discriminate. Of course, they want you to discriminate -in favor- of people with certifications, nonetheless.
Moreover, 'prejudiced' isn't even the action of 'discriminate'. It's merely a statement of mindset towards someone with a particular resume. If -that- were illegal, you'd be talking thought police.
"You're not allowed to think badly of that person for that reason! 10 years, maximum security!"
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
Then you've probably thrown out some resumes from very talented people who would have done the job very very well. Their only mistake was to bother to go out and get some additional qualifications that HR people like to see.
Then again, I don't think they'd want to work for a person who'd do that.
lack of one loses you your job.
...
I speak from personal experience. I once worked for a small company that I wore a variety of hats for -- internal IT & help desk, Novell system administrator, network engineer, sales support engineer, and external help desk. I built several Novell networks from the ground up (v3.12) and migrated a pre-existing Novell server (v2.15) from old & failing hardware. I build the company's first linux dial-up server, using slackware 0.96. I also introduced the sales staff to some of the first Wintel SMP motherboards to hit the market, as well as WinNT 3.51. Then, because I didn't already have enough work to keep me busy 80 hours per week, my boss wanted me to get Novell certified.
The offer was couched in the following terms -- you pay half, and the company will pay half (reimbursed to me). But if I should leave, quit, or be fired within two years of receiving my certification, I would owe the company for their share, plus interest. Somehow that didn't sound very equitable, especially considering that there was no increase in salary. I asked for a while to think it over, over the holidays.
When everyone came back from the holidays, there were 2 company announcements: (1) that the company was going to go public, and we could all buy $00.01 shares in the company for only $15.00 each, and (2) that a 401K plan was now being offered, but with the only investment being either (a) shares in the company or (b) shares in the owner's company that leased us all our business equipment.
I turned down the offer for employee shares in the company, and the offer for the 401K plan, and for the company's 50% "investment" in my Novell certification. And surprise, surprise -- within 6 weeks I was being asked to train my replacement or out the door immediately. Three weeks after I left, a fellow employee contacted me to see if I would consider going back to work for the company. You could perhaps imagine what my reply was
With all these style responses, from people who seem like they are in hiring positions:
Does anyone in the US actually hire new graduates for entry level positions anymore? Do you even have entry level positions?
Opera, Proxomitron-Grypen,GPG 0x0A1C6EE3
Illegal? Where? Are you seriously suggesting that people with certifications are some sort of protected class under the law? I filtered out 3-page resumes. Do you think that is illegal, too?
-Dave
For my part, I went to college for two things:
I discovered that #1 was available to anyone for the asking. #2 would've been moot just 10 years later. If I were 10 years younger, I might have never gone to college. I did eventually get around to finish my degree.
So, you'd be prejudiced against me, who paid for 90%+ of his college degree out of his own pocket (no student loans!), going to class from 8am to 1pm, working from 3pm to 11pm, coming home at midnight to split wood to heat his house for another day so he could get up at 6:30am the next day to do it all over again? Yeah, a damn shame I wasn't a self-motivated go-getter.
I can tell you for a fact that a proper college education has nothing to do with spoon-feeding. A person who knows how to learn also knows that sometimes just having a book and a computer isn't enough and you need a mentor to push you to the next level. College isn't the only source for such people, granted, but it's none the worse for its nonexclusivity.
I agree that a degree doesn't make someone a good IT person, but to hold it against them sounds to me like reverse snobbery.
MCSE=Microsoft Certified Solitaire Expert
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
These questions are easy. Do you have any more?
If a potential employer tried this garbage with me, I'd think they were a joke and probably start trying to throw their little game. You may interview me verbally up to 3 times with up to two of those times being phone interviews. I will not submit code samples since all of my code is the property of my current employer and would be subject to release restrictions.
Good luck trying to interrogate my references. Most of them won't put up with nonsense either. I don't work for morons and they'll figure out that you're indirectly questioning their integrity.
This attitude has struck a nerve with me because of some interviewers I had at the end of my undergrad. One had the audacity to hand me a drug test package on the way into the on-campus interview - I dropped it in the trash on the way out. Not to say that I use drugs - far from it, but if you want me to pee in the cup, you better have a job offer for me, and I better like it enough to overlook your questioning of my integrity.
You strike me as one of those people that started their own company for the thrill of "being in charge" and hey - that's great, as long as you never intend to build a product larger than a website. With this as your business model, you should never expect to acquire or retain top talent. You would have lost me long before the end of your process.
You have to remember that it isn't a blessing or privilege for the upper part of the market to work for you, only the bottom part.
DISCLAIMER: This post was not checked for speling and grammar- if you complain- you're a whiner
I have no problem landing a job, once I get to meet the hiring manager. I have the skills, and the experience. The problem for me is getting past the HR drones and automated systems, that don't know a good resume from a bad one, and only screen based on education and certs.
In this industry, no one cares about degrees or certifications. If you cant answer simple questions on a 30 second phone interview, you're not going to last the rest of the five minutes. The bottom line is do you have experience with x,x,z? When stuff breaks, are you going to be able to fix it fast? When problems happen, are you going to be able to engineer the most efficient, robust, stable, fault tolerant solution? These things have nothing to do with a PhD in computer science.
Thank god networking stil works and even sites like LinkedIn exist, especially for those of us who have the rare ability of being able to learn practically anything without a need for institutionalized tuition.
I think you're right. Further, I think many tech managers are starting to realize that the "Certified Idiots" they've been getting aren't as good as the non-certified guys, so I think they're paying less attention to certifications than they used to.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
While it is unusual to discriminate someone for a redeeming quality it is not unheard of. A recent discrimination case was brought against Merill Lynch for refusing to hire Yale graduates, as the hiring manager was a Harvard graduate.
I can see where you might have a case if you can prove that the degree is a "redeeming quality." This person, however, never said they refused to hire anyone with a cert, they just said it was a strike against them. Also, they justified it as an indication that the candidate was unsuitable for the job because they wasted their time with useless bureaucracy. That may be an opinion that many people do not share, but it is just as valid as saying you prefer not to hire candidates from a particular school because you think their programs teach non-productive material. That is not to say that you would refuse to hire anyone from that school, merely that you don't think they are likely to be qualified. I'd be willing to bet that the case you mentioned earlier involved a person who either refused everyone from Yale without considering their other qualifications or refused to hire anyone from Yale, because they had gone to Yale, not because of how that qualified them for their job.
it's not illegal... it's actionable.
This
Although this thread is starting to get personal, let me take this back just a bit...
/gam/
I agree that one's possession of a cert is not a valid reason to choose a candidate. But I disagree with some of the tone that I'm reading here toward individuals who do happen to have them, for whatever reason. Clearly, from the response here, there's some animosity towards individuals who can "afford" it or that they're "lucky" in some way. Regarding the tone, although it hasn't been specifically stated that certs are bad, that's the implication. There also appears to be a misconception about individuals who have certs feeling that individuals who don't are lesser people.
From my personal perspective, folks that I work with earn my respect. I don't give it to them because they have a cert or don't have a cert. One of my best mentors was a second level manager above me and he had no degree. He just didn't believe he needed it, and knowing him for as long as I have I agree with his assertion. Does my having a master's degree or certification mean he was a lesser individual? No. In fact, that didn't even play a role in our relationship. Ever.
So, taking this back down a level... I'm still paying for my education, and the only way I would consider myself lucky regarding that education is that I have an income that can afford to pay for it. But I earned my place within my industry. No luck about it.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
I have recently taken (and passed) certification exams for Zend PHP, MySQL Core, and LPI Linux 1. I work with these technologies every day and studied for these tests. Some of the questions were pretty difficult, and some were fairly easy. I think that anyone who has passed these tests does possess a least a minimum amount of knowledge about these subjects. Anyone can say they know something on a resume, but if you can prove you know at least a minimum before you are even interviewed... in my opinion that can only help when job hunting. And if your current employer pays for it, why not get certified for your resume's sake? But if your just trying to impress your coworkers and others already in the industry, I doubt that certs will help you out much.
I would say that your CS class is atypical in the extreme. My company hires CS types to work in my department. I have been, on occasion, responsible for making them into useful employees. Very, very few have anything like the conceptual grasp of computer systems and associated arcana that the course you describe would require.
Most of the CS degree holders I meet describe long hours of tedious study of useless (in the vast majority of computer related jobs) COBOL on ancient and limited systems. Some describe hours of Novell training (and not the cool new SUSE-based stuff, I mean bindery context and the like) or, even worse, a lot of M$ crap that's not relevent to enterprise level computing. People who look at me like I've grown another head when I tell them to shift something right two bits or similar low-level concept.
Thinking outside my Head
> certifications for a language do not mean
> you are a good developer, but if you really
> are good they should be like icing on the
> cake.
Yup, nicely stated.
The Army reading list
Illegal? IANAL, but I think the law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, gender, etc. I don't recall ever seeing that certifcation was a protected group.
5. The shop is a partner of a vendor who requires a certain amount of certified people. Cisco Gold Partner, for example.
How else is a potential employer going to realize that you have a given skill set?
IT Certs are not a guarantee of knowledge, nor are they exclusive indicators of knowledge. A good employer will be willing to look beyond the certification- but at least that piece of paper gives them a little bit of validation from a trusted 3rd party.
I call bullshit on you. Certificates are really helpful when you get your employment through headhunters. They love them some certificates. Having said that, I thought I knew it all, or enough of it all anyways, until I got myself into some cert courses. Low and behold, I learned a whole bunch of helpful stuff that I didn't know before the courses. Worth the money? Probably not but the certs I got definitly got me my present job. Nothing wrong with being qualified AND certified.
Wow, next time just keep the chip off your shoulder..the only thing you can knopw is that yu will never know it all nor enough as it always changes everyday...if you just did some general reading before you ever hit the cert courses you would have already known that you knew shit.
When I hire for an Open Source guy, certifications are a red-flag for me. Unless you're very junior, the fact that you wasted space in your resume to tell me that you're certified in a dozen meaningless things tells me you're the wrong guy for the job.
I just recently saw a resume with a bunch of certifications on page 1. He had a college degree... listed all the way on page 5. Roundfile. Goodbye.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
/gam/
A bit extreme, no? I hope I never run into someone as arrogant as you in the work field,.....
Luckily, all you have to do in this guy's case is put a cert on your resume and walla! Anyways, arrogance is just ignorance being mean.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
I am not so sure about certs - I never saw the point, but as it sits right now I am wondering if my four year university degree was worth the student loans!
I graduated with a Comp. Sci. BS from a Nebraska university two years ago, and I am barely at where I want to go. At the time: excelled at the classes I took (mainly programming c++, java, cobol, and perl), went out and obtained a side minor of Native American studies, and was planning on going to grad school for AI and complex adaptive agents. Due to financing I opted to not go massively in debt for my masters or PhD, and started to move up in the company I worked for. I worked up to a managerial level in a call center, then hopped the wall to our software testing team. Another guy and myself are the only two in the department of 40ish people that have IT degrees. I took the job in hopes of bouncing to the programming department, but I still had to stop and meekly say "Ouch!" at the prospects. I wonder if it was worth the four years of university to be where I am or could I have just gone and snatched up a bunch of certs and a two year technical degree. Would I be in a different boat or just the same situation two years earlier?
The new dilemma is to peruse a masters degree or get another BS through a technical college in a year or so in "computer information systems technology" (read: programming specific). Would anyone care to comment on the use of a masters' degree over another BS or a barrel full of certs?
At the risk of sounding like a fanboy. I have to say that I have been very impressed with the CWNE certifications from Planet3 Wireless. I'm a CWNA (Certified Wireless Network Administrator) and a CWNT (Certified Wireless Network Trainer). I am looking very forward to getting a CWSP (Certified Wireless Security Professional).
http://www.cwne.com/
In an ideal world, everyone with a certification or degree would demonstrate that they have the knowledge conveyed by their respective paperwork. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. For example, my father has a degree in CIS. I don't, nor do I have any certifications. However, where he knows one particular aspect of computer systems and IT, I'm much more broad in my experience. Don't even ask him to build or repair a PC. I'm not saying that anyone with a degree or certification has less knowledge than someone with only hands-on experience, or that people with only hands-on are better qualified. There are many of either camp that definitely shoot that to hell. Rather, all I'm trying to say is that too much emphasis on expensive pieces is pointless. Who would you rather have design security software, an 18 year old kid in high school who's able to hack into servers or wrote a major virus, or a multi-degreed, certified professional who's still trying to figure out how the kid did it?
Age and treachery shall overcome youth and skill.
I would suggest that you possibly use correct punctuation, it might make you seem older than a High School graduate/Sophomore (whichever you prefer, really).
Keep in mind, Starbucks does not count as an office, or an IT job.
- certs are just one element on a CV. All elements need considered (including the cert)
- Any employer that hires someone JUST because they have a Cert (or degree) is an idiot that deserves what they get
- Any employer who refuses to hire someone BECAUSE they have a cert is an idiot and deserves what they get
- People who globally discount the value of certificates never have any themselves. They don't know what they are discounting
- Some people with certificates are crap with the technology
- Some people with certificates are absolute god-sends and fantastic to work-with/employ
- Some people without certificates are absolutly crap with the technology
- Some people without certificates are absolute god-sends and fantastic to work-with/employ
- Certificates take effort. It is impossible to pass a certificate in an area that is new to you without doing substantial work.
- Someone highly experienced in an area might be able to pass a cert with little effort - but the effort was already applied gaining the experience.
- It is possible to gain a cert by rote memorising a large battery of questions - without truely understanding. People that cheat in this way cheat at everything including their workplace - avoid such people, do not BE such people
- Some people use certs to validate to themselves that they've achieved a milestone in their learning. These people ensure they actually LEARN the stuff - hire thesepeople, try to work alongside these people, BE these people.
- Certs generally validate or accredite product knowledge - that's a good thing (but you may need more)
- All certs expire (including degrees). Just because the bit of paper doesn't have an expriy date on it doesn't mean that the holder still remembers the material.
- Some certs are trivial and only validate knowledge that someone should know in their first year
- Validating that you know the basics is important (If someone can't pass A+ in their first year working as desktop support thenI don't want them)
- Some certs are up there with a PhD - rarely but they exist. CCIE is about as easy to get as a PhD - neither are impossible, both take years of study and experience
So - what I mean is, consider certs in their place. They do have a place, but they are not the be-all-and-end-all of a hiring decision, neither should they be discounted out of hand.The last time I heard, there was no US Labor Department Law that outlawed prejudice based on the presence or absence of IT certifications.....
rm -fr
I believe the EEOC only prohibits discrimination based on age, sex, race, national origin, disability, creed or religion (the so-called "protected classes").
Last time I checked, IT cert'ed as well as Yale degreed individuals do not comprise "protected classes" - hence, discrimination in hiring based on these criteria is not illegal per se under EEO law.
"A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don't have a J.O.B." -- "Fats" Domino
In the end, I see the objective as being able to hire the right person for the job and pay them what they are worth. So here's my spin on it...
I've got some certs in various areas: OS's, hardware, University degree, etc. To some extent they all have helped me but sometimes I have been disappointed in the exams' ability to figure out if I'm "certifiable." The fact is you always get out what you put in. I know useless people with and without certs, as well as great people with and without certs.
I'm now involved in interviewing people for technical consulting positions and have a few tricks to weed out the "fakers" as I like to call them.
1- Ask them technical questions in the field there being hired for. I start with simple stuff like "What command, util, or tool would you use to do XYZ? Be technical." and slowly get more difficult. You would be amazed at how many interview end after the first few easy questions!
2- Then I go high-level. "On your resume, you said you personally did XYZ. What were the broad technical steps to acheive it?" You would be amazed at how many applicants admit that they were on a team of people doing XYZ and they didn't really do that part.
3- Compare the project time lines to the size of the project and inquire. "Really, you did a datacentre OS upgrade all by yourself in a month. How many servers were upgraded?" If the timeline is too short warning bells go off. If it seems really long, I ask for reasons or issues.
4- Buzz words on the resume. I never met a really technical person that put ITIL under the heading of technical certification, because it is management cert, not a technical one. Sometimes the buzz words just stick out and give the wrong vibe. Geeks aren't always good at marketing so I don't reject quirky resume's that often feel geeky as opposed to the ones that look polished by a marketing expert. But i look for people that can learn to present themselves with more professionalism.
5- I look for people that will get along with the successful technical members on my team. It would seem that people with a certain level of integrity and skill seem to bond quickly with others that are similar. I try to get at least three of my top people in the interview with me, at least for 10 minutes.
If the person is right for the job, certified or not, I'll hire him/her and pay for the certs. As a consulting company, our clients expect that (unfortuantely). Sometimes I get a real superstar that can sell himself to client's without the certs. Unfortunately, their resume's still can't be used on Governement Request for Proposals where certs are in the list of mandatories. In that case, we help the individual get certified if time permits.
As for determining salary, the best way I've found is to hire the person as a contractor to test the waters. Hey, manybe they won't like working for us! It seems a win-win. Based on the job, I can then make an informed offer.
It isn't a perfect system but as long as my clients stay happy, I can live with it.
Still, the whole cert thing is a pain in the butt.
I didn't intend to make any inference that certifcation is bad, and if that implication came across I am sorry.
All I am trying to say is, don't reject an interviewee just because they don't have the qualifications that another interviewee has.
If you'll bear with me on my inference - it only promotes those who can afford certification to be able to get these vacancies. How can I afford to get these qualifications if I am not given the opportunity to afford them?
As for being able to take qualifications at work, why would any employer wish to send me on a course that would just serve as a piece of paper, and wouldn't learn from?
If you are fully willing to believe that you've got where you are purely because of how much you have worked, sorry, but in my eyes, this makes you extremely arrogant. Just consider how unfortuate other people are who can't pay for their education, or get an income to even start one.
Dug
IT is just one component in any business. If managers needed to acquire every skillset essential for running a business, no business would ever get started up. Certification indicates a minimum level of knowledge and nothing more. It is impossible to know how good someone is until they've done the job for some time. Unfortunately, a working BS detector has not yet been invented and BS artists sometimes slip through the net. Industry standard wages are a fact of life for everyone including pointy haired bosses - live with it. Everyone's chances of being promoted to management are slim. You confuse intelligence with having the appropriate skillset. Identify what skills managers need and make a serious attempt to acquire them. New technologies are always a huge risk. Unless innovation brings a huge advantage, it makes more sense to seek incremental advantages that bring minimal risk. It took a long time for guns to overtake bows and crossbows in the ranged weapon stake. Even then, other factors such as terrain may nullify any advantage they offer.
I have a small (ie: just me) consulting company and I made the effort to get my MCP and MOUS certification.
I'll be the first to tell you that it doesn't take a genious to pass the tests. And I'll also say that there are plenty of non-certified people out there that are great at computers.
For me, it all comes down to marketing.
Whenever I'm at a mixer or tradeshow or something, and I'm wearing my Microsoft Certified shirt, people see it and ask questions. Those questions turn into leads, which turn into clients.
The MS logo is a widely recognized one, and having it on your business card, stationery, website, or even your shirt, is a great marketing tool. It adds a lot of credibility to your typical small/med business owner.
-David
As a person who suffers from learning disabilities, but who has been in the IT world a long time, I can say that I frown on the idea that is behind the certification tests.
I can't take tests well, it's just the way I am, but that doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing. The real world results of my work has proven that I can do the jobs I am asked to do.
I also have decilned to participate in the tests, because it is quite obvious that a large portion of the process (and profit) was learning how to take the tests not whether or not you knew the materials.
I was at a small consulting firm that started down the M$ certification pathway, and I still ended up knowing way more than almost all of the consultants who took the tests, even though I was the only one who refused to take them.
So in the end, I'm sure I could have made more money if I had played the "certification" game, but it was not worth the stress the testing would have caused me.
That said, I whole heartedly endorse training, hands on classes, and learning in general, just leave the "certification" testing out of it.
Now go ehway or I shall tauntu a second timeh!
The fact that you don't know how to spell irritate irates me.
That's fine with me. However, if you were to ever see my resume, get an email from me or read anything I write for work, you can be damned sure there won't be a misspelling (or grammatical error) on it.
On Slashdot, I don't really care enough to proof what I write. I don't care about spelling and grammar of other posters either. In fact, the only spelling and grammar that I do care about, is that of the "editors". I'd be seriously embarrassed if I were any one of them. At work I take people to task for such mistakes, I don't care who they are. I've sent email to my CEO deriding him for grammatical errors.
There's no place for shit when you are representing your business. On Slashdot, you represent nothing, especially when you have nicknames like "Anonymous Crowhead".
*jumping on my soapbox*
Certifications were developed by a marketer.
Someone in marketing thought to themselves, "Hmmmm, how can I make more money for the company?". Then a light-bulb went off - let's create "Certifications", but let's not bother verifying identities of those taking the tests, or whether or not they *reallY* know the materials. As long as they pay us, we'll throw some bullshit material at them, and as long as they memorize what we wrote (regardless of accuracy or applicability to real world configurations), we'll pass them.
Thus the certifcation craze was born.
I have yet to meet a single individual who has been certified in anything who actually knew the actual workings of the material they were certified for.
Don't even get me started into the arguments that I've had when it came to installing systems.
I finally had to get 2 identical systems, with identical software products, and told the individual to do their install their way, and that I'd do mine, my way.
Not only was i done with mine in a fraction of the time it took the *CERTIFIED* individual to set it up, mine was the only one that worked. Our network security group wouldn't even allow the other box onto our network because it was full of security holes.
I personally am 100% self taught, over a 20 year period. Information that I haven't used in years, still sits ready, and available for use. Mostly because I learned it (and most everything else) the hard way. Once you've learned something that way, it doesn't just go away.
*standing down*
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Actually, this is done to some degree via reputation. On the other hand, some leaders whom you would think are moral sometimes fail to meet their own standards. (NB Pat Robertson controversy re: assasination)
Probably, a good test would be to see if they even have their own set of internally consistent rules. A good test would be to make each tech write down his or her version of the Geek Commandments. What are the guiding principles they follow when they do a job? Or does the fact of merely asking the question freak them out? Or do you see them standing there with the "Deer in Headlights" (TM) look?
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Not the only shining light, I too find my CISSP certification useful.
Not trying to troll, but even your CISSP certification didn't give you the in-depth know-how on how to protect your web server from being spammed. Read the comments in your Advice column to see what I mean.
What would your clients say about that? That your CISSP certification was meaningless or you just have "paper knowledge"? This just because a perfect example as to why certification can be questionable...
About 15 years ago my boss needed at Novell CNE on the payroll to win some contract he was after. He gave me a day off a week to study the practice tests. A month later I had a shiney new CNE certificate, but I could hardly set up a print server. I am great at taking tests. MSIE looks not too bad but fortunately the dot com era allowed me to retired from the BS IT biz.
I'm reasonably confident that a Summa graduate in CompSci from a decent university can learn just about anything in IT.
I doubt the same can be said for all those with a bunch of IT certifications.
When asked about my certifications I say ' I was Certified 100% All Beef, a few years back but that has since lapsed.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The "point" of certifications is the same as the point of work experience, references, college degrees, military experience, eagle scout badges or just about any damn merit-based reward you can think of... to sell your image to the people deciding who gets the interviews.
Sure, you need some relevant certifications. You also need a college degree. Hey, and work experience, a couple of years at least. Having all three of those things on your resume is the only way you can reasonably assume it'll have a chance.
None of these are perfect, all are fallible, and there is no magic bullet. Really, the closet thing to a magic bullet here is knowing someone who knows someone who is looking for someone to fill a position. It's networking. A list of IT professionals with whom you have worked in the past that have a good opinion of your skills is priceless when it comes time to look for jobs.
The only way you can shortcut this process is if you can somehow land an interview with the team you'll be working with. This is hard to do at large companies, but often possible at smaller ones.
There are bullshit certifications, degrees, work experiences, references, etc. If your boss can't tell the difference during an interview, frankly, there's no excuse for that and you shouldn't want to work for him in the first place.
Typically it's the face to face with the new boss that sells him. Of course, if he's an idiot, that's another story. If he's an idiot, and you still take the job, well... you made your own bed on that one. Don't get to thinking interviews are one-sided.
Work to live. Don't live to work.
Hell is being intelligent in a world full of idiots.
I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Let's forget for a a minute that that is illegal.
How exactly is that illegal? If you're not allowed to discriminate between job applicants based on what is in their resume, then what exactly is the resume/hiring process for?
If you've ever been through one of those harassment/prejucide/whatever training seminars, then you know that what's illegal is discrimination/prejudice against protected classes, like racial groups, gender, age, etc. I can almost guarantee (though I do not actually KNOW) that people being with/without certifications is not protected in this sense.
In other words, learn a law.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
I can live with that, especially since you don't even know me or have any basis or reason to judge who I am or what I'm like.
/gam/
"In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice, they are not."
I am Oracle certified and have talked to a lot of other people who went through various certification processes. Certifications do and don't matter depending on what your looking for.
Some if the points in favour of certs;
- CISCO certs are suppose to be the best for paty increases. Followed by Oracle and I think IBM is not getting into the game.
- It shows you actually know something about the system your certified in. Which is better then some one who just says they are. HR people like that.
- Some places require they have certified people running systems to be compliant with something, say for insurance liability purposes. An employer may get a better insurance rate if they have a certified DBA running there systems.
- Good certification programs make you know something about the product. I took the Oracle exams and I learned more about that DB product then I could ever have hoped at work or on my own.
- It's a good way to enter a field if you have no experience at it. Pass a Java certification and you can land an entry level java programmer position easier than with out it.
The points against certifications;
- Some certs don't seem to make a difference like some of the Microsoft ones (I am Excel certified! woop-ti-doo).
- When I was doing my Oracle DBA cert, a co-worker was also doing it at the same time. She was an utter dolt who knew how to pass a test but was a total idiot in practical matters. Great she is certified but she is still a moron.
- Experience is still a better indicator. People with cert's and no experience should not be put in intermediate or expert level positions. Stick to the entry level positions.
- In some interviews I had recently during job hunts some places didn't give a crap about certification, others did. All depends on the hiring company.
In short, they do help in getting your foot in the door and showing you are capable of something. They do not substitute for experience.
A certification has exactly as much weight and proof-of-knowledge as a degree from the Grace L. Ferguson University and Storm Door company.
So... my degree is no good now either... man, what a crappy day I'm having. BTW, any job openings?
The fact that you don't know how to spell irritate irates me.
I know this was a joke, but is "irates" the verbed form of "irate"? If so, then you get back to the original statement (pretty much).
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Ehhh!
Wrong.
Whoa. Watchout - you'll be having some folks who spent years and thousands of dollars on their college educations pound you into the ground for calling their "well rounded" education a "Certification".
As stated in another thread, certifications are nothing more than a financial vehicle to allow software vendors to rake in more money than they would with just software licenses.
A college education can (and usually will) get you a job much faster than having a handfull of certifications in your resume.
Now, counter to that, with over 20 years of professional experience under my belt, with ZERO college, ZERO certifications, I've yet to have ANY problems finding a job, or advancing in my career.
You only have to have 2 things to be successful in any endeavor.
Those two things are attitude and aptitude.
The attitude that you show to others, that says you can-do it.
The aptitude that backs up the can-do attitude, by allowing you to know / understand the work with little or no effort.
Without attitude / aptitude, you can have your college degree, your briefcase full of certifications, and still work at McDonald's flipping burgers, as that's all you're good for.
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
I don't believe that passing an exam makes you any more skilled in a topic, but their primary use is not for the person who holds them, but for potential recruiters.
Case in point. You advertise a job for a Novell/Microsoft network admin with some basic Cisco skills, paying maybe GBP 35k a year + benefits etc. How many CVs do you think you will receive ?
Judging from my experience anything from 50-200 CVs for this sort of job. Every single one of those CVs says that they have the experience necessary to do the job, can back it up with previous references and most of those have a lot more than you are actually asking for.
Now, you can't interview 200 people. You probably can't do 50 either. You have to cut the number down.
So, a good way to do this, that isn't againt the law (i.e. not racist, sexist or ageist) is to see who has some relevant qualifications.
Personally, this is why I thik the MCSE was so derided. Nearly everyone had one, so of those 200 people, you would have 175 who had it and that wouldn't help you. Although if you didn't have one, you were dropped from the shortlist straight away without even looking at the experience.
If you looked for a CNE/MCNE qualification which historically has been viewed as much harder to get, you might get 10-20 CV who had it which gives you a nice number to then use to generate a short list.
So, qualifications are useful to make you stand out against the crowd and give you an edge in the job selection process.
If your certification is common, then not having it, even though it is "worthless", could damage your prospects or getting to interview.
I work at an ISP and the thing that bothers me about these certifications, because the conversation goes like this:
Me: I have a complaint from a customer that their remote office is losing 1 of every 10 Email messages.
MCSE guy: Ok do they have a virus?
Me: No, here is what is happening, I have a sendmail log segment and around 10% of messages sent to the remote office are bounced with a 5xx error, I have sent you the log segment.
MCSE guy: Well, you probably have a sendmail problem, I have a super platinum MCSE+ and I know that sendmail is usually broken.
Me: The error is coming back from your exchange server, not from sendmail.
MCSE: I am running 13 servers here and because I have a super platinum MCSE+ I know that everything is ok here, its probably your end.
Me: Ok, here let me help. I will send 10 test messages to the customer's email account and a CC to your hotmail account, and send you my log segments for each.
MCSE: Ok, I got all 10 in my hotmail account. (he checks the customers mail account), but the customer account only has 8.
Me: Exactly, and the sendmail logs show 5xx errors coming back from the exchange server. (lights go on, 13 mail servers with one mail server acting up and sending 5xx errors). I also have a copy of an bounce message from an entirely different ISP that doesn't use my sendmail server.
MCSE: That still looks like a sendmail issue to me, probably you have your DNS setup wrong.
AAAARRGHHHH!
The point is, the people doing hiring are so far removed from what you do, they have no way to figure out which canidate is better. The requirement for certifications tells you more about the company than it tells the company about you.
It is like the clueless bachelor in the Carl's Jr./Hardee's commercials. He stands and stares at the HUGE mega-mart selection and does not know what to get. He know he needs cinnamon, but there are at least four different choices and different prices. He is transfixed until he finds the medium priced item with more adjectives. Ironically, by trusting the market place {not the market} he will end up spending more than he needs, since nearly every spice in the mega-mart, is the same mass-produced lowest common denominator. Going to a GOOD spice supplier would have produced a better product, in which a little goes a long way, but has a better result.
In this example, the HR drones and the hiring managers are using certifications as extra adjectives as a crutch to make their decisions because they are not capable of wise discernment. They naively trusted the market place to present the best candidates to line up like a beauty pageant for them to judge. They will likely fine an acceptable, and generally ok person for the job accepting an average wage. They will be very unlikely to find a quality person who a little of gets a lot done.
Yes, I am biased. I do not have a college degree or any certifications. It has been my experience that if they require it, they do not need someone of my caliber to do the work, and therefore I do not want the job. If the market is any guide, I believe my six-digit income backs up my opinion.
At the moment I'm trying to understand the difference between a certificate of Masters in xxxx versus a Masters degree in xxxx. Are they the same?
Love the narrow minded view points. The best IT people I've ever known didn't have CS degrees. CS degrees are just as worthless as certs are. They will both impress stupid HR folks, but that's it. I definatly suggest the testing of candidates, but not considering someone who doesn't have a CS degree is just retarded.
Some certifications are worth it. I've had good luck hiring people with Cisco certifications. Other certifications are not worth paying any attention to from a hiring standpoint - the Java certifications. In general, certification is valuable when used as a self-diagnostic tool. And, unfortunately, they are essential during any sort of economic downturn. Whenever there is a surplus of technical workers, hiring managers will start to require certain certifications just to reduce the applicant pool. Anyone who tried to find development work in late 2001, early 2002 will testify to this.
Where I think certifications help is in establishing a common bod of knowledge for a specific domain. While experts might laugh at the LPI Linux certs, they did create a series of comprehensive materials that people can read to learn the core subject area for Linux. One of the most helpful books for someone starting in Linux is the O'Reilly LPI cert book.
I used to hold certifications in contempt, but I've found that contrary to what many people say, they have a net positive effect. I wouldn't recommend that someone take certification tests for any other reason than self-assessment.
------ Tim O'Brien
Well, how would you react to someone who listed "ENRON Certified Accountant" on their résumé?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
An interview. So pay the money (and hopefully, you can convince your current company to flip the bill), stick it on your resume, and you may have a better chance at getting that first interview. After that, you're on your own.
For those of us who like to geek out in style, you can get the spiffy logo shirts with your certs pretentiously embroidered on them. I wear mine to family reunions - they're chick magnets.
My sig sucks.
...but bad when being hired. As an employer, I will 9 times out of 10 choose the certified individual, but ONLY if they have the people skills and the project background to back it all up. Certification + shallow project experience = as good as no certification at all.
Then again, I have also hired a Junior in college with no certification and begged him to stay when he had decided to quit to focus on preparing for grad school.
However, I do have to say that now that I have accumulated a significant amount of project background that speaks (yells) for itself from my resume and references, it annoys the heck out of me to have some recruiting weasel shove a multiple choice "skills test" in front of me before allowing me to go in front of a client. Just look at my resume and call my references, you twit. These tests usually have nothing at all to do with the solution the client is looking to build. Even if it did, it's like saying to the potential hire, "Here, write code for some problem for which you don't know any requirements." There are a zillion "right" ways to write code solutions for a problem. These benchmark tests only test your ability to take a test. They also completely ignore the art involved in programming.
Case in point? I got laid off in 2002 and went back to an old recruiter I had left two years earlier. They actually gave me a test about the same skills that I had kicked butt on when I was working for them before and which skills were clearly current according to my resume and references. I failed the test (not by much and mostly because the online testing software was crap) and thus failed to qualify for a job that I was a cinch for.
if I were running a business, the cert is a good way of filtering out those who can't even pass a simple test.
When you fail the test because you typed "show running config" instead of "show running-config" in the fake IOS console, it will be obviously because you can't pass a simple test, yes.
I figured the word "ego" would be mentioned in this discussion somewhere but a search turned up nothing. I did, however, notice a few people listing their certifications...
I am the inventor of the hilarious refrigerator alarm.
... any education that you might get. University degree, a community college, or what have you. One only has to look back on their experiences in college/university or hell even primary/public school and even highschool to see where *you* would have changed the curriculum and stopped wasting the students time with a bunch of filler or out-dated courses (i.e. programming with unisys icons, or 8088's and turing)
IMO the big difference between being certified meaning anything is the quality of the teachers, quality of the curriculum and the 'labs'/ real world problem solving you do to get experience, those who don't do any hands on problem solving consistently will not learn anything.
Im my shop (of about 25 programmers)...not 1 person is certified. We did hire one guy, but he turned out to be one of the worst programmers I had ever seen. Sure he knew every built-in function, class, method, etc etc, of the development language but he couldnt put them together into a logical program if his job was rideing on it....and it was...and he was fired for incopitance after a while.
anyway some of these tests just quiz you on the syntax of the language. Its like testing a mechanic by asking him to identify every part of an engine but then never seeing if he can rebuild a carbirator or diagnose a bad timeing belt..
Put in your own recruitment ads using your team-building budget, but don't mention the company name.
Interview them, and if they pass, re-write their application and resume so that HR will hire.
Its more work than you should have to do, but it gets the results you want.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
I got one job (at a huge company) when the hiring manager just bypassed HR and started calling headhunters. He got in some minor trouble, and I got to work for a cool boss. You definitely limit your employment possibilities by not having the certs to mtach your skills, but you weed out far more bad employers than good ones. It comes down to whether you can afford to be picky.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The rule of thumb used by HR is to equate 3 years of experience with each year of tertiary study. So, if you have 20 years of experience, then certs don't matter much. However, there is another way: Write a book on the subject. If you are so good that you can write a book on it, then obviously you don't need the certificate.
Oh well, what the hell...
Personaly, I love hearing stuff like this. I do not currently carry any certifications and my degree (AS Computer Information Systems) is a joke. However, I work around a lot of PhD's who respect my experience. When something new comes up, I'm the guy they ask for advice.
As for my thoughts on certifications, most are worthless. I currently run the computer refurbishing department. We take off-lease computers and returns, fix them, and resell them. I've meet so many A+ certified techs that can't tell the difference between an IDE and floppy cable, it's not funny.
As for being over-certified, I defer to the help-desk manager... His thought was A+ is alright. However, anything more probably means that your going to move on before you become useful to the department.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
That's nothing - had a Windows admin take three days to correct ACLs on a user (she needed Write and not just Read). He never did it. And he also had the gall to say the permissions look correct on the server there was just a problem on the ALL of XP clients. Yah, apparently when you let XP calculate the effective permissions it LIES!).
I had to pass the job onto another admin who knows what he was doing - a 30 second job. Turned out he apparently set the permission on the directory in question but didn't know how to propagate it to the subdirectories and files she needed to write to. Well around here I'm a NetWare guy NOT a Windows guy. (FYI: I don't think he even has a MCSE)
I feel that most that have recieved their A+ certifications do not deserve an administration position. The A+ is so very, very basic and mearly touch the history of computing and some of the basics. If you had to aquire the knowledge on how to format a hard drive, or make a directory...then perhaps you don't have the intimate knowledge of the inner workings and processes of your operating enviroment. Even when they touch on Windows, it is taught using wizards, and not console enviroments. An admin will not have the luxury of wizarding everything, and wil have to do processes remotely. This is not someone you want to paying a premium for when the shit really hits the fan. I have my Novell Server Administration cert, and I can't get a job anywhere with it...it's fairly useless, unless you want to get some juicy info from a Novanet. At least I got it free. =)
To a noob, root is like a gay bar...and he's wearing assless chaps
In 1998, I started toward a MCSE, doing self study. I took a couple of tests, passed, and lost interest. I was working in jobs where the cert didn't matter.
In 2000, I went to a "boot camp" and completed the MCSE. I put it on a resume on Monster and Dice, and within three days, I had a job that paid twice what I had been making.
My new employers said that the cert was not required or needed. But the recruiter would have never looked at my resume without the cert, I would never have gotten the interview.
Are certs BS? Sure.
Was it worth it for me? Absolutly. It paid for itself quickly. I would do it again, if it mattered.
..in the fine art of resume-writing, what is it that you look for in a resume, if not education and qualifications? I mean, besides the obvious(listing previous experience, for example).
I have to smile when the county calls me to troubleshoot problems that their IT experts caused---a very good rep beats certs hands down----if you don't mind years of rep building. It will get your foot in the door, but if it's just your "hobby", I say humbug.
Not trying to flame, just stating my own opinion, but discriminating against someone for the certifications they have and mention on their resume is completely ignorant and unfair (especially if you are talking about Cisco certifications).
I'm not saying you have to apply any worth to them, but they certainly shouldn't count against an appplicant. This is especially true given that, in my experience, the prevalent attitude of HR departments and IT directors is that certifications are desirable.
What does it cost for a person to go to a place like ITT? I've heard of people spending 20-40k there and they get out and they're lucky if they get a helpdesk job. Hell most of them are lucky if they know how to use Active Directory after going there.
I'm a "paper MCSE" it seems. It was offered in highschool as a free year long class back in 2001. We were fed tons of "you'll be able to get a great paying job right away!" Well, after passing all the tests (i was one of 5 or 6 out of 25 that actually could pass w/o memorizing "Practice" tests. hahaha) Well, after a few years of tech work at a little shop, and a few temp jobs and some smaller network installs at local businesses, i am still "unexperienced", unemployed, whatever. One guy is movin right up the GE IT ladder. Yet another friend programs and installs cable modems. I mod xboxes and work The Ebay, and seem to do better than most. My point? Strong intelligent IT people know enough how to make money when they need it. Eventually you might get lucky and get with a good company and be able to showcase your years of knowledge, but a cert is no way a foot in. I always look forward to the obscure questions asked in interviews, more as an icebreaker to get past the paper and into the "what do you need me to do?" part of the interview. Any company you would want to work for will be able to joke w/ you about it. Otherwise be thankful your not working for an idiot. The proper response is "yes, i'm certified, but what kinda things do you really need me to do?"
This doesn't solve the problem of sifting through piles of resumes, and it doesn't solve the problem of interviewing a candidate for a position at an organization where there's no one else with the same skills. It can also be difficult when time is a significant factor in the interview process. Given those limitations, a technical interview is simply the best way to screen people.
At my organization, candidates must go through an interview that includes 2 to 3 hours of technical questions. We ask a large number of questions in the skill areas that we require, and we dig deeply into the skill/knowledge areas that the candidate lists on his/her resume. By drilling down on important subjects, we like to push the interviewees to the point where they can't answer questions in any more depth, thereby determining the extent of their knowledge.
I also like to bring a practical aspect to an interview if possible. For instance, in the area of networking knowledge, I will give an interviewee log files or tcpdump output of certain types of traffic and ask for an interpretation. From that I can tell what they really know about what they're seeing, and how much they're just reciting book knowledge and acronyms.
From everything I've been hearing over the last several years, the only certifications that hold any weight with managers that know anything about tech are the Cisco certs. It used to be that you could pretty much write your own salary with a Cisco cert. Don't know if it's that way anymore.
Microsoft certifications have been worthless for closing in on a decade now. Unless they've changed things drastically in the last couple of years, they simply handed out too many of them. An entire industry has sprung up that basically teaches the tests for MCSE certifications, thus effectively making them worth less than the paper they're printed on. I'd definitely look at a potential employee's work experience WELL before I looked at the long string of capital letters after their name.
Personally, I don't have any certs and have never had trouble getting a well paying job. Of course, now that I'm self employed (computer consultant), they're even more meaningless. Clients never even ask about certifications.
Human Resources
During the technical part of the interview, you ask very specific questions. Granted, not everyone who's going to qualify will know the "right" answer to everything, but it's often telling by what questions they ask when clarifying your quesiton.
Trivial / non-real-world example, applying for a Perl position. Who would claim to have a Perl cert? Anyway:
Q: "How do you create an hash reference in Perl?"
Good Answer: "Anonymous or from an existing variable?"
Bad Answer: "What's Perl?"
Or do you trust non-tech people to assess tech position candidates?
Wow, you know, that's the point of hiring people, is to DISCRIMINATE against those who don't have what you're looking for in a job. Now, you can argue that someone not hiring Yale grads is dumb, but aren't companies allowed to make dumb decisions? Aren't they allowed to set irrational criteria for hiring?
I mean, I agree that Certs make sense; But some might not, and maybe based on industry experience that someone rejects a candidate because he/she earnestly feels its better for the business. Doesn't he/she have the right to decline an employee for reasons they see fit? Its their job, afterall.
What if I owned a general store in a small town, and I knew most people. If I think a certain kid who applied for a job at my store is a jerk, or no good, or comes from a family whose parents I don't like, am I obliged to give him the job anyways? Is the job a charity, or a social resource, that everyone can lay claim to?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've met and worked with many people who have certification for everything, yet their practical, hands-on applied experience and knowledge is severely lacking. I've noticed many people who get certified often don't have that passion for IT or computing, and its merely a means to get a foothold in the industry to begin making that 'big IT pay cheque.'
Its all good and well to go for certification, but without a solid foundation of experience it really is kinda silly - especially from the employer's behalf - when they plug these guys and girls into positions the hiring market recognises them as being 'qualified' for, dispite the fact that they've never mounted a switch into a rack, deployed a replacement Exchange server or built a Redhat box out of spare parts to work as a sendmail server for e-mailed scanning, etc.
I've been in IT for just shy of ten years. I'm a systems administrator. I don't have one scrap of paper that says I can do what I do - but I do it and I do my job well. To each their own in the certifying game, but please don't fail to recognise the importance of experience to back that stuff up.
Funny story - a guy I work with attended a seminar recently in Sydney for various Wireless security issues. The seminar went for a day. At the end of it, he was presented with a nice laminated pretty certificate stating 'Certified Attendance' to talks and examples pertaining to wireless security.
I believe he's getting it framed.
Same is true of high school diplomas and/or college degrees. This is not a phenomenon unique to the IT industry.
Certifications are basically a way of simplifying due diligence. If you hire somebody certified, you can at least make a cogent argument that you TRIED to hire a not-bonehead. If you hire somebody not certified, and they don't work out, well, guess who gets scapegoated?
It's an artifact of blamestorming, which is part of working for other people. Play the game, or don't.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I worked in a major Information Technology group (supporting 80,000+ users). A new position opened up with higher pay and more benefits and they interviewed two people for the job, myself and a co-worker of mine. My co-worker got the job and I didn't.
When I spoke to a friend of mine who was on the panel that decided who got the job, he told me: "He had certifications and you didn't."
I'll never doubt the usefulness of certifications again.
Developers go for MCSD or SCJP/SCJD. Not the Cisco/Novell networking stuff. The MCSD from Microsoft is pretty thorough, as it is a 5-exam course that covers everything from web development, to web services, to database and standalone application development.
I've seen many job postings asking for irrelevant certs. Unix admin positions requiring a MCSE is a popular one.
You know , its not at all illegal to discrminate against a canadidate- and indeed that's most of he point behind hiring a person. You discrimate against all those candidates except for the one who meets your specific qualifications. The *only* exceptions to this rule is race , sex (sometimes! see the Hooter's case ), sexual orientation , and potentially medical conditions... Can someone correct me here if I'm wrong?
Personally, I'm prejudiced against people with college degrees too... the way I see it, if you're spending years in college, you're not a self-motivated go-getter who can learn independantly, you're just another drone who paid a fortune to be spoonfed and can't be trusted to do anything more than go through the motions like he's been taught.
This would be a good thing to tell people whom you hire. You're using some terms here that I translate as follows:
self-motivated == doesn't expect to be paid well
go-getter == wants to work long hours
learn independantly == be assigned random tasks by somebody who doesn't know any better
The disdain for college degrees seems to originate largely from people who attempted them and failed. The faults in our tertiary educational system notwithstanding, by having somebody with a college degree you're getting somebody who may have realized that however bad a college education had become, a high school education is currently woefully inadequate for anything more complicated than a clerk at a convenience store. They have taken the only option offered to remedy this fact.
Despite your unvoiced assertions to the contrary, it is ridiculously hard to teach yourself almost any truly advanced subject because the textbooks are written by one of a handful of experts in the subject and require interpretation by somebody versed in the material. The person who wrote the text almost certainly knows the subject so well that the explanations that make sense to them will be incomprehensible to a novice. By having a (competant) instructor, you will add a second perspective to the textbook's author. Having to demonstrate mastery of difficult subjects for which a single resource is almost certainly insufficient will hopefully develop enough mental flexibility that a college-educated individual will be able to adapt to different tasks the same knowledge that seems domain specific. It is impossible to "spoon-feed" somebody truly difficult knowledge on any subject with which I am familliar.
However, this process will produce a person who will become easily bored with repetitive, annoying tasks. So, if you're looking for code monkeys your hiring strategy makes sense. If you're looking for people who can actually lead a project and get things done (correctly!) and know how to take intelligent risks in unfamilliar domains, I fear that you would be better off with an individual with a degree from a decent institution. But you'd have to pay them what they're worth and realize that with your attitude they'll likely attempt to replace you someday.
I agree they are expensive and in most cases, you can pass it without knowing too much [by studying sample exams]>> That is when certifications defeat their purpose. On the other hand, if a sincere learner studies the material and passes the exam by really gaining from the study sessions, then certification means a lot. I guess the trick to it is that we study sincerely i.e. understand each and every concept rather than settling for answers that don't make sense to us. I enjoy studying for certifications as i gain a lot of skills and gain a better understanding of complex concepts. I feel more confident after studying for certifications. Paying for certifications even with the vouchers is a pain. I HIGHLY recommend studying for certifications, but do not necessarily endorse paying for certification exams. I have heard from many HR people that they filter resumes by checking certifications... I hope its false. But if it is the truth, then may be you won't ask "Why don't i get an interview call" To summarize the post, i believe we should study for certifications and if we make some money on the side , just take the exam. ~~Jibran Ilyas
Don't forget that certifications go stale over time.
If the recent past is any indicator, Microsoft certified professionals (MCPs) should count on re-qualifying for their credentials on a three-to-four year schedule. Thus, certification costs and effort recur, and must be distributed over three- to four-year calendars.
Certification pros and cons.
pros
* Bolsters enterprisy adoption of product/domain/language.
* Sometimes helps overlooked concepts
cons
* Failure to represent real-world concepts
* No case study or project, no real free-form responses.
Certifications = Just shut up, sit on your own with open-source talk please, damn it makes me feel like any free/open source development we/i have done is cheating!!
There should be and exam to see how long it takes the examinee to add value to an free/open source project and get there name on the authors list.
Surly that would be of more benift than knowledge by paper that usally runs after 4 years.
The reason for IT Certification is so that some loser of a manager who is incapable of telling what you really know from a conversation with you is able to hire you and do a CYA at the same time. That way if/when you are a lousy employee, he can point to your resume and say well he had certification.
Thank you for enlightening us with your dogmatic generalizations based on your extensive experience with every IT professional on earth. Did you learn those skills at the same distanced learning center where you got your Computer Science degree? I hear Advanced Dogmatic Generalization Techniques is one of the most popular courses offered by these programs.
Here, let me try it:
Most people in masters programs are usually only in them so they can avoid joining the work force where they might actually be held accountable for their incompetence, or so they can feel justified in spouting off such drivel as seen in your post because they know everything.
I hope I'm going to get flamed... so have at it. The truth hurts.
Later, another collegiate tool with his head up his ass
When weighing what the point is of certifications you must look at what aspect of the industry we are talking about. I know for PC maintenance the A+ doesnt mean a whole lot. I say this because half of the test is based on nothing but Microsoft subject matter. In an environment and society that is becoming more and more computer literate Microsoft certs dont mean much at all. The average user is much further along in their knowledge of how to fix a Microsoft product now than they were 3 years ago. The market of MCSE's and MCSA's is saturated with some people that know what they are doing, some that just memorized answers to the questions. Nonetheless the market is filled with people who have been laid off and have many more years of experience than someone like me just starting out. Lets not facctor in the possibility they might have a degree as well. ON the other hand companies gaining weight such as Red Hat and Apple have certs that are highly desired. A lot of people dont know how to maintain these operating systems since they are just "jumping on the bandwagon" so to speak as switchers. I cant blame them...I love my Mac. Being a Apple certified desktop technician or certified in OS X, I see it as a very useful certification. If you look at the SAGE salary report which is mainly for system admins - they list relevant certs, but then again you are dealing with a hodgepodge of technologies mixed into one when dealing with systems (usually). It doesnt really do any good to have certs since certifications are vendor specific. Certifications are vendor specific. So if you are looking to be certified in an Operating System...it might be a good idea not to get certified on one whos market share is declining, or losing business to another vendor. An example again is not getting cert'ed with Windows, but get Apple Certified. The integrity of the vendor is also a key factor. When you had an A+ or Net+ that are or were lifetime certifications...that doesnt look so good because you are not forced to maintain the knowledge to be privied (sp?) to the title of XYZ certified. Cisco on the other hand is probably the MOST reliable certification out in the market, other than the CISSP, but this is an exception. Cisco revises their tests every few years, and requires a much higher percentage correct on their tests than most other vendors. Cisco also requires that you pass simulated labs, up to 5 for the all in one CCNA test. Not only do you need to know the material but you need to know how to understand it, interpret it, and know what to do to fix the problem. It is a true display of applying the theroy learned in the books. The bottom line is a certification is worth something, though much more than the old saying, "something is better than nothing". The problem is each area of IT has different emphasis on education vs experience vs certs. Networking IMO is the only place certs are highly useful. Getting a job is always a balanccce of education, experience, and ccertifications. I know idiots with degrees, I know idiots with certifications, these people are on both sides of the fence. Get certified in things you enjoy from vendors you believe in! Personally I would say that investing time in your interviewing skills is the best investment anyone can make.
MCSE Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Engineer.
A response to a RFP looks good if the people attached to it have certs.
Therefore, you are more sellable in a proposal and therefore more hirable if you have certs.
Additionally, some companies/government departments require certain certs for people doing certain jobs.
In reality we all know they meant the person went to a week-long class and passed the test at the end, but even this is sometimes impressive as it means 1: the person is willing to go get training, or to someone evaluating a contract 2: the company is willing to train people.
I do security
I don't mean to troll, but the whole idea of certs are stupid. I only have one cert beyond having a degree in CS (B.Sc-CS), and two diplomas (a 2 year Electronics-Engineering diploma from the local tech. school, and a diploma in datbase administration from the local university (not where I got my degree) when I took an Oracle OCP course. When I took the DBA course, we all agreed that the course was quite stupid. It was fantastic for people who were good at boneing up for tests, but even if they did great on the test, they themselves admitted they were otherwise useless (Note: they didn't have to attend the 6-chapters-and-300-pages-per-day classes to ace the tests, just get a book on the questions and answers. Every third day, these 'test acers' would show up for class. They sucked in the labs, but didn't care since they did well on the tests. In the end everyone agreed that the 'power crunch' classes that cram 9000 pages of material into 6 weeks (or 1500 pages/week, or 300 pages per day) offered very little in educational value. We all did agree that businesses like these things because they think they are getting more (but they aren't), and that more than 90% of what they teach is lost within 1 month (add anoter 7% within two months). Reason: there isn't enough time to absorb the information, so it 'bounces' --goes into (very) short term memory, and is quickly replaced with new memories. Since there is little 'second referencing' going on, your memory of the information is easily lost (and you do). Even one second reference (like actually using the information somewhere), would provide better recollection (but most people call that second-reference "experience", and that isn't something these quickie courses offer). Short answer: longer term 'programs' where you are expected to show applied knowledge of the subject, provide much better comprehension/learning than the 'quickie-cert' courses. It doesn't mean that they are useless though. If you have used the product over a period of years, and could have just taken the tests, using the course as a mere refresher, they would provide a symbol of the knowledge you have gained over the years. These course are not billed toward the long-term experienced professional though. They are sold to the newbie and imply they are a substitute for long-term knowledge and experience. In that regard, they fail.
Let me start with Thanks! I was unaware I had been spammed a bunch (BTW: I just fixed it).
My CISSP actually didn't certify that I know anything about how to secure a geeklog/php/mysql website, but by having my CISSP I should say I should know better. Well I do know better.
It's interesting to see my own security weaknesses in an analysis of a compromise. Not really surprising though, I haven't really read my old articles in months, don't monitor it and haven't really secured my website any more than the normal security best practices when I built it a year or so ago.
Of course, since it's importance to me is like a 2 on a 10 scale and it's on somebody else's servers at a web hosted environment, it's not running as tight a config as I would ever consider using at one of my customer's data-centers.
It's actually an example of a prudent security policy. Concentrate your resources (in my case, my overburdened time) where the risk/threat is highest and the rewards highest.
Having been spammed, I just suffered a vaguely embarrassing publicity event that will have minimal effect on my consulting work (even though it was publicised deep in a thread on Slashdot).
I had spent the time that I could have used securing my website, doing things like caring for my 2 year old and working for others to bring in revenue and pay my bills.
Somewhere low on my to do list is scrapping and rebuilding my website with a tighter config and better software. But since my website is more an amusement to me than something that actually brings in revenue, I kept bumping it lower and lower...
I know it probably sounds like excuses, excuses, excuses... he-he probably because they are. I will definitely be raising the priority of securing my website.
Just don't take the sorry state of my semi-abandoned website I once built, as indicative of my own capabilities or of CISSPs in general.
-------
But all of this is besides the point. I'm not saying certifications say anything about your qualifications. I took that test, I know how little it means and that it says little about me.
What I'm saying is that it sounds good and works as a successful marketing tool to recruiters and as such is worth getting.
If you want somebody to secure your website, hire a specialist by looking at their experience and pay them to take the time and do it right.
Of course looking at certifications won't let you figure out which are most skilled, that's what interviews and probing technical questions are for.
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
It's a god'damn rip off.
After highschool, I didn't do so hot at college. Bigger league classes weren't for me, and since I scored low on the math entrance exam, it woulda been 6+ semesters before they ever allowed me to take a course that even remotely involved a computer.
So I went to one of the local technical trade schools you see on tv. Yea, it was alot of money. Yea, some of the stuff they taught was simplistic that any one could learn. However, alot of what they taught, I learned off the bat, without needed 2+ years of other courses before. You don't need to know Trigonometry to piece together a PC part-by-part.
I graduated in under two years, with just a diploma. They offered degree courses, for Associates, or Bachelors if I chose to do courses online. At that point I had already sunk in around $15,000 into it, of which I still have enormous student loan payments.
So here I am, an "entry" level technician. Most places don't require a degree, but alot of places require, certifications. Best Buy, of all god damn places, wants it techs to have a minimum of an A+ Certification. There's just no way..
- First, the test itself cost money. I have never in my life, paid for a test. I'm sorry but I cannot morally and justifiably pay for a test I have to take. This is why I never took the S.A.T's in high school, my parents felt the same way. So, let's say for a split moment, in an alternate reality, I would pay just so I could eventually get a job: If you pay, take the test, and fail you don't get your money back. And, you have to renew that every couple years. I cannot afford to chance that. Gas here locally, in a small souther town, is $3.00 a fucking gallon. It's almost $40 to fill up a 12 gallon gas tank on a small two seat car that gets "good" gas mileage. Do I need to go on, about cost?
- The knowledge itself, is minor. I mean, I've looked over alot of the supposed A+ material you'd see on the test. There is some redundant shit there. Questions about Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 3.1 I was like 10 years old when 3.1 was in its prime, come on. Even mom n pop businesses that have few computers, generally have at least 9.X, 2k or sometimes even XP Home. Ya also don't see any Linux, Unix or other OS questions on there (Maybe a few Novel ones). I'd love to learn those, but with one computer that can't be replaced, I can't afford to attempt dual booting incase I fuck it up. And you know, MANY businesses use Linux or Unix instead of Windows...
So here I am, no certifications, no experience. The few places that would higher entry level, want certifications, and the places that would eagerly not require certifications require experience. It's an endless cycle.
Hell, a good example; my uncle has this life long friend that works for a small local business that needs new technicians desperately. Now, him and my uncle have grown up together since they were even half my age and their almost like blood brothers. They'd do ANYTHING for each other. So my uncle puts in a word for me. The guy tells me the same thing I've said here; entry level requires all these various certifications, anything higher requires no certs but at least 3+ years of experience.
My options now are basically, save money. I've attempted getting jobs at local places, even stooped as low as Wal-Mart, just so I could save money to take these infernal god damn tests, just so I can get a job I am trained for. I mean it's not enough I put almost 3 years of time and effort into the education for it, and almost 20 grand when it was all said and done.
I love computers and technology, but I'll be damned if it's not like some exclusive high school club where only those who can afford certain things can get anywhere.
Aw Frell this
To be honest I feel that after my current "certs" run out I think I might just let them go. Every single job that I've interviewed for, applied for, asked about...they all wanted experience more than anything else. They kinda acted like "certs" where an added bonus on top of whatever true real life job experience you had. To me that makes my "certs" meaningless and kinda expensive. Especially my m1cros0ft ones, what was I thinking? Like they ever got me anything...
I'm in the UK, don't have a degree and have worked as a freelance contractor for the last 9 years. Without certifications I wouldn't get short-listed or interviewed. They're invaluable for getting in front of people, particularly in the contracting marketplace.
I've lost count of how many certification exams I've sat but I think I'm up to 24. Three CNE's, half an MCNE, MCSE, CCDA, CCNA, VCP, PRINCE2, PROJECT+ but there are more I could add quite easily; PHP, MySQL, Dreamweaver, MCSD, MCDBA. However, it all becomes overkill and then recruiters start to think you're just good at passing tests.
I'm currently looking at moving to Canada and without a degree at 35 it's going to count against me. I'm hoping my certifications will help to gloss over this fact, realise I'm British and that our degrees are not the norm but I imagine I'll have to add a few more letters such as a couple of ITIL qualifications which are being scheduled in for September.
All of my certs were paid by myself and done via self study books, except VCP which required a course. I just hope they don't all go this way or I'll have to spend even more money to keep my certs up-to-date.
Not that bad an idea actually.
It would be nice to have some way to objectively show / measure the respect of your peers. Karma and the moderation system are a way to do just that.
If I had a UID as low as yours, Dr. Evil, I probably mention it in interviews. ANYTHING to break free of the pack of other qualified applicants and make yourself stand out is a good thing.
If Karma swung over a much higher range (say hundreds) and you could get a certification saying "long-term Slashdot well respected poster" then it would probably be worth getting.
Of course it would invite Karma fraud and that's not a good thing.
But there are worse ways to evaluate applicants than going over an applicant's past slashdot postings.
Its not users who are broken, it's systems not taking account their likely behaviour and fixing it technically.
When you talk of someone being certifiable, you mean they are probably insane. So when they ARE certified, what does that make them?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My story is thus: Over 10 years in the IT industry, 9 of those as a self-employed, broke, Geek. How broke? Well, let's just say I never bothered to bookmark ThinkGeek.com, okay? Number of times asked for Certs = zero. Conclusion? If you're a consultant, nobody cares if you're Cert'd, since failure to perform doesn't result in you getting paid. Then when I finally did apply for a job (with one of my former clients) they never even asked, since obviously I was competent. My suggestion, for what it's worth, is to set yourself up as a consultant to establish credentials. I'm not saying that's a total substitute for writing certs, but if your resume can show business experience, and if you have even a few satisfied clients for your prospective employer to call, you are far ahead of the rest of the college monkeys who come out with a lovely framed Cert and hours of lab experience. The posting about the certs being strictly for HR departments is pretty true - the only other people who care are the little old ladies bringing their spyware-infested Compaq to Best Buy for servicing. "Ooh, look, Mildred. All their boys are A++! We can trust them to do a good job!"
"Apparatus dignosco occultus, satis non supernus."
You know, there used to be that ford mechanic that had the shop down on the corner, but he just worked on fords. You had a ford, so you took it to him and he always fixed it.
But a computer is not a ford. A computer is a complex piece of technology that changes almost as rapidly as the days pass. With computers you don't get the choice about what you want to learn -- the good tech guru learns everything (or as much as one can be possibly expected to learn). Sure, somebody will have an area of expertise, but if you walk up to a good sys admin and you say "I have (X) hardware, make it into a fully functioning network using (X) Operating System," they will be able to pull out a product for you of some shape and size.
Computers can no longer rely on "I know windows," "I know linux," or "I know Mac OS X". None of those, alone, are good enough. You have to have at least a VERY functional knowledge of each, and likely be an expert in at least one. If you can't live up to that standard: go home.
But certifications don't establish that this person has done one bit of work into the area his cert is, past getting it. A cert doesn't prove anything. Experiance and knowledge are the key -- not some stupid piece of paper worth $$$$$.
to annoy the people that do all the real work, by putting those annoying %^^##@^%$ sigs that include every cert in all emails...
If any of the existing tests exhibit this same bias, then the certs are less than useless. They would, in fact, be harmful by teaching the way things should be instead of the way things are.
If someone showed me a resume with the message "you wanna see my certs?", I'd run!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I guess you can say the same about a college diploma right?
As Will Hunting said "You can get the same education (as at Harvard) for a dollar fifty in late fees at the libraray."
Cover-your-ass... That's the name of the game.
Companies like "certified" IT staff for the same reasons they've bought off on spending hundreds of millions implementing things like ISO-9001 and TL-9000 certifications. That way, when something goes wrong, they (management) can point the finger at someone else.
Take two random applicants with comparable skills and experience. One is certified, and one is not. Eventually, the individual makes some mistake that brings the wrath of upper management down on you.
What do you think would be an easier position to defend? Hiring somebody because you have a good "gut feeling" about them? Or hiring them because a recognized authority (certification board) has said the individual is a certified "expert" in the field?
Personally, I think the system is flawed. I've met a large number of "certified professionals" that were nothing short of incompetent. (I've also met a number of non-certified folks who were the same.) All it allows is for employers to pass on the blame of making bad hiring decisions.
Employee makes a mistake? It's MS/Cisco/Novell/etc's fault. They said the person was a certified expert. Company folds? It's the ISO-9001 consultant's fault. They signed off saying the company's processes were sound.
There are some that have reached the rank of IT manager without having any actual skils. Still also there are IT Managers that depend on the Human Resource staff to hire IT professionals. The idea is that these people are so unskilled at what they are hiring for that they must rely on the cerifications to make their hiring decision. Now I for one agree with you. All a certification tells you is that I payed the money and took the test and happen to do well on it. It's a piece of paper. Example. Many years ago I worked at Best Buy as a computer tech. This was before I obtained my A+ certification. Why did I wait so long? I thought it was pointless. There were several A+ certified techs there that broke computers on a regular basis and didn't know their butthole from a hole in the ground. When they did break computers I had to go behind them and fix them. After that job I know people would be looking for that certification as pointless as it is. So I got it. I agree though that education and experience mean far more than certifications ever will.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
The perception of certification carries from other industries where certification is required -- 'required', meaning, it would actually be illegal for you do do your job without the certification.
Certification == licensing.
There's nothing like licensing in most of the IT field.
When I'm involved in hiring decisions (rare these days), I don't look at the big picture of education. I have a few categories of questions that you will have good answers to if you're experienced, period. As for education, if there's time, I'll try to determine if you had a passion for subjects like advanced calculus and if you did anything interesting in physics.
I'd be far less interested in "where" you went to school, and far more interested in how seriously you took certain subjects, since the wrong answers here can make you a dangerous person.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Actually, there's already a push to outsource radiology (radiologists are MDs) and other analytical services. Many hospitals outsource lab work. It is always better to have somebody on site, but cost controls will always seek the bottom...usually to the detriment of the client. I am all for open and competitive markets, but some things need protections. That's really the reason why there is licensing. To allow competition without compromising quality too much as would happen with complete deregulation.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Finally, as a person in a hiring position, I do not consider them at all, and am definitely prejudiced against someone who puts them on their resume.
Isn't that kind of like not hiring a mechanic who took courses in auto repair and instead hiring someone who "taught himself" on his (still not running) car up on blocks in his front yard?
The whole point of the certification industry is to create a cash flow for the certifying entities, the training establishments, the book authors and publishers. Secondly certifications provide a somewhat nebulous proof of a skill-set so that knowledge-free managers can sleep comfortably at night. That said, well thought out tick-the-box tests do sort the absolute chaff from the grain in a rough and ready sort way. Remember that MCSE == "Must Consult Someone Experienced", and, joking aside, that the LPI series are actually useful, but that you need to achieve level 3 before your knowledge is of any real economic value.
self-motivated == has a sense of craftsmanship and a pride in their reputation that makes them respect their own work too much to be part of doing a bad job
go-getter == entrepreneurial, has people skills, is involved in the various other business processes surrounding their position
learn independantly == doesn't need to be told to improve themselves, will become a more valuable asset the longer you deal with them, treats new tasks in unfamiliar territory as an opportunity and succeeds
These are the characteristics I want in the people I deal with. Not a certificate verifying 4 years of passing classes.
So between the two of us, there's employers out there for everyone. And they all lived happily ever after, The End.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Try telling that to your next interviewer.
I will take the time to interview liekely good candidates.
I can say in 5 minutes if they are bullshiting me or not.
Then I can check the CV of the ones that know what they are talking about.
Of course I do my work as an interviewer finding the best person for the job.
Lack of a pointless certification paper will not make me lose the right person for our organization.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
if it ever comes to the day where i legally require that piece of paper to claim i know how to program or fix a PC. THEN i shall do a degree or a cert. untill then, they can fuck off with their useless $2000 pieces of paper.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Companies get many CVs becaue they don't specify the tasks of their jobs properly.
If you take the time to describe a job role properly you will be surprised how easy it is to filter the people that will not fit the bill.
Companies using templates for positions are bound to be inundated. Job applicants, helped by job agencies, know which are the most used "templates" for given posisions are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Ba-dum-dum!
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
Where is this fantasy land you come from...? The local McDonalds? Does all this angst come from failing your A+ exam? That's the longest string of bullshit I've read all day... Congrats, you've wasted 2 minutes of my time.
Me? I have little use for those with what I like to call "fancy book-learnin'," but to each his own.
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
I agree, I'm an IT trainer and have seen the paper mcse's come through they know nothing, the brain dumps are ruining the value of industry certs. I have had students that arent suited to IT at all and guess what they fail their exams.
However most of the people I train are already in the industry, they know their stuff they just want the piece of paper to go with it.
For anyone that says the certs are useless try getting one (possibly other than A+) and see how you go.
Gates isn't, eh? Maybe it's just an urban geek legend, but isn't this the sames Gates that coded BASIC for a machine he didn't have in three days, and it ran properly on the first run?
If other reasons we do lack, we swear no one will die when we attack
Then you sir are an idiot who deserves what you get.
Sure there are some people that basically cheat their way into a cert by rote learning questions - but there are many who actually study the material and actually LEARN the material that is examined.
Blindly discarding a CV just because someone has gone to the trouble of being certified is even worse than blindly hiring someone for the same reason.
BTW - the only people that think MCSE is easy are those who never bothered trying, or those with decades of expreience. For those in between they are bloody hard exams that do test knowledge to certain limits. And no - they do not prove you a server god, or prove skills - the limits are simply "reasonable knowledge" - butthat is an important aspect worth considering along with the rest of the CV.
Certs have a place within a strong CV.
I work for a public school district, and on my first day of work, was asked by my employer what I thought about certifications. I replied, "It's just a tool of corporations to make money off of a useless piece of paper". Long story short, my temp job turned into a multi-year contract. BTW: I am a college drop-out, self taught, technology enthusiast. I have no paper behind my name, but I can figure out pretty much any technological problem with enough google'n. I make more now, per year, than anything I made up to date. If you can show what you know, a signed parchment is moot.
I learned you can more effectively sell NetGear in to SMB than Cisco. My company talked me into it for a "SOLD" project that never materialized. There was no reimbursements even though they were verbally agreed too. Many of the people at the company have an A+ or are MCP's, I usually help them network or diagnose hard drive failures. I have found a degree is important as a status symbol and probably more so for later on than now. I have pushed into a Sys. Admin position more now than anything and I really am bitter and generally hate the IT field and hope everyones job goes to Mumbai or somewhere and we all become homeless. I really got taken for a ride from the 2-year 'technical' college I graduated from (at least on paper) and have a bitter regret for following Microshaft Crisco and their ways to the darkside. It pains me to know that I wasted all of that itme on CCNA, however proud I was I didi it, because all I really walked away with is complete memorization of the OSI model and other non-Cisco specific things that had I gone a real school that actually cared about what you had learned would have taught me the OSI model in depth and breadth in a tleast two classes. Nothing else really has been more valuable than that to me. Since using it and understanding computers are just layers in an onion like an Ogre you can solve most admin. and other system related issues, even with software. So no, if someone, say on a one-off contract or something says you need to have an A+, I LAUGH AND FORGET IT. I purchased and built hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Winblows and UNIX servers over the years, along with countless network and client systems and have found paying attention is a more important skill that cannot be taught. The polyanna coomputer field comes down to crap fulfillment by the unknowing sods in control becaue they are greedy money-grubbing whores and control us with slips of paper or something.
I know a large number of people who have wasted their money on "IT certification" which is nothing but a piece of paper you can wipe your ass with. A better idea is to get some good books and perhaps some hands-on experience instead so you can impress prospective employers with a demo of your skills.
Nobody is arguing that these cases don't exist, or that degrees or certifications prove anything. However, on average, a person with a degree in CS and a decent GP is more likely to be at least somewhat knowledgeable about the field than someone with no previous experience and no degrees who simply claims that they are good at CS. There are plenty of self-taught people who are good at CS, but there are also plenty of people who style themselves "computer experts" because they were known among their parents' friends as the local "computer guy" who knew how to install RAM in their computer.
I don't disagree that there should be less of a rigid weight on degrees, especially if we're talking about people who have previous experience in the field. But, for the most part, degrees are a pretty good predictor when we're talking about people with no previous experience.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
In my experience, having an IT certification is hardly ever a bad thing - for two reasons.
Firstly, it shows that you're willing to learn and able to pass an exam (albeit an easy one sometimes) - but at least you're not sitting on your backside and waiting for work to come along, you're actively improving yourself. Looking at someones record of certification can often tell you whether they approach their personal development actively or passively.
Secondly, having a certification on your resume can get you past the initial sifting that many recruitment agencies carry out for their clients. In areas where there are many more applicants than jobs, not having a certification can exclude you immediately in the eyes of the agency, regardless of relevant experience.
Do the certificates mean anything? Sometimes. I've used them in the past for the purposes described above but, when I interview someone they must be able to talk about what they've done in the past - commercial or personal experimentation - in some detail and enthusiatically or as far as I'm concerned the certificate is a sham. I'd much rather hire someone who can talk for ages, draw diagrams and discuss problems they solved than someone who just flashes a pile of certificates.
I'm agreeing completely with anyone else who beleive that IT certs are waste of time and money. I've previously done a CCNA and was amazed by the number of IT companies and organisations I went to here in Australia who had never even heard of a CCNA and those who didn't even know who CISCO were. Then after trying to get a job as either helpdesk or sysadmin after a Network administrators course at TAFE I was told that in order to work as a sysadmin I would need to have an MCSE so I did the course for NT and 2K only to realise how dogdy MS's teaching was for the OS's and i'm sure that many other people have noticed this as well. And after all searching I finally found a job and am now doing the CNAP HP IT essentials in preparation for an A+ only to find out that the information in this curriculum is off kilter as well (appeareantly UNIX and LINUX both run entirely on FAT32) So certs are in my mind a complete waste of time especially when the information contained in the courses for them is incorrect.
I figured out whats wrong with the world , its other people -Dilbert
If someone knows so much about a subject and is not certified, what is the big deal about taking the test and being certified? After all, since they are so knowledgeable, the test should be a snap. Am certified myself, and can tell you the test is just a bear minimum foundation. There is so much to learn beyond the test. Yes, there are plenty of dummies out there that are certified. But that doesnt mean the ones that arent certified are not dummies. Unfortunately for the uncertified ones, the ignorance approaches 100%. And usually the uncertified ones are busy telling you how much they know and how little you know. Then they come running to you, literally, to fix the disaster they created. Regretably, more than a few actually run departments.
I can see both sides of the cert arguement. But this particular article is idiotic.
>
True - You can have the knowledge without having to pay to be Certified when it comes to computers.
True - Just because you have the certification does not mean you actually know the material as well as someone who is not certified. You might just be good at taking tests.
So what is the point of getting IT Certifications? To have a piece of paper?
IT Certifications can be pretty expensive for many.
Compared to what? Up to $900 a unit for college? I consider the time required to study for a cert to be much more "expensive" than the $200 to take the exam.
From feedback from a recruiting consultant, I made various changes to my CV (resume, for the Yanks), including putting my quals at the end of the CV. "Real" qualifications (GCSE's, A-Levels, Degree) first, then industry training. I had put these first on the CV, in a nice little table showing date, institution, etc. Simple bullet-points at the end of the CV seem to work well - they back up the claims I make in the body of the CV - who I am, what I do, what I've achieved for previous/current employers, without saying "whoohoo! I've got Cert X or done Training Course Y".
I also trimmed down the detail on older jobs, since more recent stuff is more relevant (in my case, at least, since I've been in the same job for six years).
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
I'm with the grandparent, too much emphasis on certs and to the bit bucket your resume gos.
Some certs are instant shitcan triggers. A+, MC??, CS where CS is taught in the business school...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
my employer can bill a federal/military contact at a higher bill rate if i have certs.
I started my career with a Sun Java certification and as a direct result got a great job working in New York City. Then after several years of gainful employment doing ASP and .NET elsewhere, I moved to the UK and got a Java job immediately - again purely because of my certification. I don't have any other certifications but that one alone has more than proved its worth.
It's a big problem. I'm in favor of loser pays legal bills, shooting all the lawyers and banning the lawyers that dodge well from holding public office.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I got my MBA last year (with very little prior experience) and now work as an entry-level Analyst. My company sent me for Siebel Training (Core Consultant, not Analyst) a few months ago and I now do some config. work along with my other (MBA-like) duties. I eventually wish to move into a Mgmt./Tech Consulting firm, as a functional Enterprise App. Consultant. Is it worth spending $700 from my own pocket for a Siebel 7.7 Core Consultant Certification? Would appreciate some feedback.
They get additional education (good thing).
They get suckered (Bad thing).
They play along, thinking that a worthless piece of paper will at least allow them to sucker someone else (Very bad thing).
The correct response when you realize you're being cheated is to raise hell not join the certified grifters.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Fact: You can have the knowledge without having to pay to get a degree in any major. Another fact: Just because you have the degree does not mean you actually know the material as well as someone who does not have a degree. You might just be good at taking tests and conformity. So what is the point of getting a degree? To have a piece of paper?
My $0.02 ( or even less.. ) but today I have to work with all the people having all kinds of certificates AND to teach them what's behind the button, a command, an API, and so on.. A little frustrating but then - sometimes some learn, sometimes not ( like today - gets you a little tired.. )
Can't actually blame the people, that's the trend. Of course I love more how it was done before - take a course on IBM ( pick your manufacturer ) and get the pass / fail "certificate". Now - it was a long time ago and I think the courses may have changed ( I hope not! ). The courses I'm talking were 24x7 internat courses over two ( or more ) weeks, covering anything from OS internals to how to sell the solution ( to customer or to your own boss ), a wrong / failed answer sent you back to learn it again, the teachers were people from real life ( field ) just teaching what they knew, the problems were real problems from every day life, etc.. Honestly - I can't see my co-workers going through that today - most go to sleep after 12h, some can take even 16h but not over two weeks.
And no course was to learn how the bits and bytes are ( that's your job ) but why they are that way and what are the caveats, strengts and weaknesses and how to use or to avoid those. As you can see, I miss the "old" times but what can you do ??
Those who show up and crack a book once a year can get degrees. But not degrees that mean anything.
CS is tricky. You need to know what school it was taught out of. When CS is part of business the degree will be worth little more then a business degree. When part of Arts and Sciences CS graduates can be too similar to math majors (theoriticians).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As someone that is an admin, and interviews people for positions now and then, I can tell you that people with hair are useless. Far too many people who have hair are incompetant and unskilled.
Five years of sixteen hours a day study?
When do you find time to eat? or go to classes??
I have known a number of CS students, and not one of them needed to put in that much time for their studies -not even the grad students (except maybe for midterm grading).
I think you are exaggerating, or maybe you just needed to study a whole lot to keep up with the others.
Uhhhhh...what kind of crack are you smoking?
It is most definitely NOT illegal to discriminate against someone based upon their qualifications for a particular job. If you, as the employer, determine that possessing a certification in fact makes a candidate less qualified, then you are perfectly within your rights to discard them as a potential hire.
People seem to think that just because discriminating based upon sex, age, color, creed, or religion, are illegal (unless of course the discrimination can be dressed up as "affirmative action"), that all discrimination is somehow forbidden. The only form of discrimination that is actually illegal is discriminating against someone based upon aspects of that person's identity that are not related to their ability to perform the job. So while you can't legally refuse to hire someone because they're bald, you can sure as hell refuse to hire them if they're not qualified. What it means to be qualified can be defined any which way an employer wants as long as they are consistent in the application of this standard. And in fact an employer doesn't even have to be consistent as long as the inconsistency is not due to discrimination based upon race, sex, religion, etc.
I do agree that having a cert tells you that someone wants to be in IT, but so what? I don't give a rat's ass where someone wants to be. I care about whether they have the talent and knowledge it takes to be there, and a certification is a piss poor measurement of both.
Now this doesn't mean I'd refuse to hire someone who has a cert if I were an employer. Certs are, in and of themselves, irrelvant. But I would be very interested to see how much importance the person I was interviewing placed upon them. If someone comes in and emphasizes the fact that they have certs instead of putting the emphasis on what they know and what they can do, then that person's not going to be working for me.
Certs are good for impressing people for whom technology is already sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. For those of us who actually know which way is up techology wise, they're nothing more than resume padding.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I believe every MBA should get their head out of their ass before entering the workplace.
You realize most CS majors are'nt taking the engineering core and are skimping on math and science. Some get away with business calculus and make it up taking accounting classes.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As a long time /. reader, this question has been asked several times, only in slightly different versions. I don't really mind, though, as it always produces some interesting comments. Yeah, a lot of them are repetitive, but so are the RIAA articles, etc.
Certified mechanics - get real. These are the guys who couldn't even figure out an engine on their own. They need someone to tell them everything. That's like getting some guy with a MD when you need surgery. I'd prefer someone with practical real-world experience cutting on me!
Even accepting your arguement the cost of the certs would need to be greater then the present value of the benefit of the cert to a low producer. Which would make it marginal at best even for a good worker.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hmmm... What's the point of a Bachelors, Masters, or Ph.D. degree? It's to demonstrate you meet the minimum acceptable educational standards for a job position. One cannot fully ascribe attainment of such degrees solely to the ability to take tests. Some credit must be given the student for understanding the material and having the smarts to adapt classroom education to real-world situations. From those adaptations, comes experience. Do IT certifications help? I think yes -- probably more-so for people with experience, but without a 4-year degree. They demonstrate a minimal acceptable education level. (It would be a mistake to view IT certifications as "training" certificates, as opposed to "educational" certificates.) However, certifications are not a panacea for a degree, particularly if you consider monetary compensation or the likelihood of finding employment. My own observation is experience doesn't count until you've been in a field at least five years with a solid performance record. My bottom line: The value of IT certifications diminishes the higher the degree you have obtained, but they're fully worth pursuing for non-degreed people looking to improve their emplyment prospects. - Banished
Fact: you can smoke 3 packs a day for your entire life without adverse effect (just ask my uncle Joe, it worked for him). Another fact: just because you take care of your health, eat well, don't smoke, etc., this does not mean that you will not actually get sick and die of (let's say) lung cancer, or not get sicker than someone who smokes 4 packs a day. So what is the point of taking care of yourself, or avoiding smoking like a chimney?
p.s. I don't smoke, and don't have any certifications either.
certified, not certifiable. Just RHCE now, but I should be getting SuSE certified in the next year or so. Anyway to answer the questions:
/.'ers that had to pay their own way, but I don't feel bad :).
<i>Do you have certifications? </i>
Yes, see above. RHCE on RH 8.0 (technically expired). I worked on a Solaris certification, using a Java-based training CD, but I moved to a Linux team and no longer support Solaris.
<i>Was it worth getting certified? </i>
Yes? Probably. It hasn't changed my employment if that's what this question is asking.
<i>How do employers, employees and management feel about them? </i>
The company I work for places significant value in certifications. All around. Certified professionals are more likely to get hired on full time.
<i>Do you pay for them? Does the company pay for them?</i>
I work for a gigantic megacorporation that paid for mine. They will pay for any upcoming certifications. Its probably not fair to the other
<i>Is it worth being certified if you do not get a pay raise for it?</i>
To me it is, as I didn't have to pay for the class or the test.
<i>What certifications bring more than others? Are specialized more employable than general certifications? </i>
From my observation, specialized certifications are more valuable. Certifications that require significantly more work than simply answering a multiple choice test are also more valuable. For example, the Solaris certification I was studying for was a multiple choice / fill-in-the-blank test. On the practice tests with little more than a few hours of study, I was getting passing grades. In contrast, the Red Hat certified engineer test was extremely difficult. Only a small portion of it was multiple choice (now removed completely). You really have to know what you're doing to pass the test even at the RHCT (technician) level.
I know several people who took the RHCE exam with a mixed bag of skill levels. Only a few without much (at least 2 years) experience as Linux admins passed the RHCT and the minority there passed the RHCE. Some of those who took the exam even with a good amount (2-5 years) of Linux admin experience even passed the RHCT!
The CISSP, CCNA, CCIE and other four to five letter acronyms are known to be good certification exams that really test the knowledge of the test taker. Note that the MCSE is NOT one of those tests.
Just wondering where everyone finds the time to study for their MCSE. I would like to get it but being a network admin and being on call and having a family w/2 kids and one on the way I seem to never even have time to pick up a book. What have you guys found is the quickest most effective way to study for such an exam. Any suggested would be really helpful.
That Jimmy-bob sure is good with the computers. He showed me how to get my email from the internets. He even is certified by Bill Gates himself to work with computers. We are so proud of Jimmy-bob.
You can't get any good admins because no one can become a good admin now. This is because newbies can't get any experience in system/network admins. Most sysadmin jobs are all offshored and there's only a tiny few jobs for them domestically. And all those jobs require 5-10 years of experience.
Hardly any school in the country teaches system administration in a structured, disciplined way which means you learn it piecemeal and miss quite a few important things (thus inspiring people to reinvent the wheel). Network administration doesn't teach you specific operating systems except Windows and some uberpopular brand of Linux. If the OS game changes on you, like say you're put into a network run by Macs? Crispy toasty city, you're more lost than Goldilocks.
Corporate America has destroyed the entry level base from which more experienced workers are made. You can't get an entry level job to get the experience required for a "real" sysadmin job.
So now you have a tiny handful of old guard admins who are probably employed for life, and the rest of your applicants are newbies trying to break into the industry.
This is Catch-22 at its finest. But Corporate America brought this upon themselves.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I have been *working* in IT for over 15 years. Started with computers LONG before that. I am probably one of the best computer technicians I know (and have trained a good many as well) and can honestly say that experience will KEEP that perfect job, but not land it. I am very good at what I do, and others (customers and other IT people) recognize it when I am working on their gear. But without a doubt, 15+ years experience may look great on a resume, but you MUST have the paper just to get your foot in the door. I have applied to so many places, I've lost count. I have gone in to interview and sounded better than 95% of all the other candidates. But I don't have a degree. And I have been told by many employers that they would hire me in a second if I did. I figured this much experience would speak for itself. I even have 21 Brainbench certs and am Toshiba certified to work on their servers and laptops. But I don't have A+. I don't have MCSE. I don't have several hundred dollars to get them, although I probably know more about networking and computer repair than 90% of them. And THAT is the name of the game. Buy your "brand name" certs, cause out here in the real world, you can be a certified dumbass and get the job you want.
By the way, I'm still looking for that perfect job...
User logging on... 300 baud... 300 BAUD?!? (Click!) NO CARRIER
I work as a contractor until I can find viable employment with a company that is deserving. I have my A+ and experience working at a fortune 500 company IT department.
With that said, an interview I had six months ago sat me down with a piece of paper and a pen - asked me a few problems to work out on paper. One was the 'have a bucket that can hold five gallons and three gallons with an unlimited water source - measure exactly four gallons using both buckets' question... Needless to say the rodent in my brain turned on its wheel as I wrote out a diagram of how to do it, and got hired on the spot.
If you can think your way out of a box - who needs certifications? The answer is all IT people do. It sounds like everyone is right knowing our experiences and what's occured. I was fortunate enough to have previous experience and a few certs under my belt.
---
For you out there that don't know the answer to the question: fill the three gallon and dump it into the empty five gallon bucket - fill the three gallon again but only fill it up to the top of the five gallon - leaving one gallon in the three gallon bucket. Dump out the five gallon bucket. Now put the one gallon you had in the three and put it in the five and then fill up the three all the way and dump it into the five... voila! Four exact gallons of water (I was thinking about beer and the wasted five gallons when I took the quiz)
I don't have any certifications, but I do have a degree.
To me certifications are just a waste of time, and another way for the corp. that makes the product to get more money. But a degree teaches you abstract theory and teaches you to learn on your own. Besides, every year or so you have to get re-certified. Certifications don't help people think out of the box.
To me certifications are just a piece of paper.
And if someone came to me for employment with just certification(s), I would have one word for them.
NEXT!!!
...is blue...
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/ecard/ :D
It looks most impressive too!
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
I hear all of you giving certifications a hard time. And you have many legitimate points but I differ on a number of them. I even heard someone say that the CCIE is not to be compared to a nursing or engineering degree. While many many certifications out there are too easy Cisco is one of the few that does it right. I think anyone would be hard pressed to find someone who could simply sit in a lecture hall with a book and pass a CCIE when they walk out the door at the end of 4 years - it takes legitimate technical skill. MS or COMPTIA on the other hand . . . simply too easy. That said, I seem ALOT of people walk out of school with a BS Degree and It's worth about as much as an MCP - their virtually worthless on a technical level - not always the case but often. Another point - I'm a consultant - and the certificates for us are not so much a testiment to skill as they are a marketing tool. There required by vendors to reach partner status and they give customers an increased level of confidence. At a minimum it shows that we take the time to at least take a cursory overview of the materials enough to pass the exam. And I think with most exams out there today catching so much flack we're seeing an improvment in the test requirements. I don't think for examply an architect can walk off the street and pass the MCSE with hardly any studying like you could in the NT days. My basic point boils down to this - Yes there are some problems with certifications but there are also problems in our school systems with students being trained by profs who don't work in the field or haven't been updated on technology. Both have there problems both have their merits.
Heh, I totally understand what you're saying. I just couldn't help but point out the irony in a CISSP's web site being spammed like that.
:)
If it weren't for the fact that you specifically mentioned your certification I never would have noticed. I'm planning on attending the CISSP training seminar this year myself.
True, and you'll notice that even for the computer field. The certifications for those who work with medical equipment is rigerous.
I might just say that there are some certifications that you have to be computer savvy to know. More to the point of the question posed. I was just hired a few weeks ago by a major online retailer. As part of the interview process I was interviewed by four or five people, and all of them were poised to the position "will you get the certifications related to where you are going to work?" I say this because I had no certifications, but interviewers and my new manager said after the interviews that I have to get five certifications in four months. If i didn't get these certifications they were going to can me. So I would say that certifications are where the industry are going instead of schooling.
With that out of the way, certs are good (or at least not all bad). I have an MCSE and a CCNA. Both were self taught and the MCSE (~$1000 + books) was paid for by my employer.
While I knew a lot about AD and IOS prior to getting certified, getting the cert makes you learn the the MS and Cisco way of thinking. So long as you keep it in perspective rather than drinking the kool-aid, this provides a common set of knowledge and a definitive vocabularity, which facilitates communication.
Certs are a way for vendors to promote knowledge about using their products, which is important. Take security for example; half the job lies with the vendor providing secure code, but the other half lies with the admin configuring the product properly. The vendor has a responsibility to help the workforce be competent at using their product.
Certs are also important for employers. While you can BS your way through both a multiple guess exam and a job interview, most of the exams are slightly harder than the average job interview. A cert doesn't mean your an expert, but it does show you're not totally green.
The people milking geeks and geek wannabes are trainers who charge $5000 for a 1 week course. I would be embarrased to say I paid that kind of money for a cert.
I wouldn't worry about the whining. There's a grain of truth in some of it, but most of it comes from the unmotivated.* Whaaa! Why do I have to work so hard to succeed? You see all the time around here. Whaaa! Why do I have to compete with people overseas? Whaaaa! Why do I have to learn this new technology. e.g. XML. Whaaa! I need a job, but my real attitude is all businesses are the tool of satan. Just look at my Pointy Horned Boss.
*Quite frankly I'm a blue collor worker, and I think that most complainers need to STFU. I wish I had a job were I could sit on my ass all day, and bitch on slashdot about how unfair life is. Now if you'll excuse me. I got to turn in early, so I can get up early and help keep the lifeblood of your profession going. e.g.electricity.
When we employ we actually almost count certification as a black mark (I say almost to get the point across). If you know computers, you don't need a cert to get a job, unless you're a newbie, and then it doesn't mean much anyway. I do believe however that if your potential employer is a book type (ie lawyer, accountant) then they will go for those with qualifications because that is all they know, (no offence to those of you that may fit that bill)!
The funny thing is, that with 6 months of experience and books, we had un-certed "Cisco" guys with 3+ years "experience" coming to me for answers, Password recovery, EGRP, STUN encapsultion etc... Not that they knew these were the name of protocols that were the solution that they were looking for. I find that people the wave away at certs, do so because they don't know any better.
How do some of the people here on slash dot poo poo certifications when they have none? I'll tell you what, I remember when slash dot had to phone home to Cisco because the slashdot crew fucked up thier router configs big time, you wanna know something, you shoulda got yourself a CCNA instead of sticking with that know-it-all attitudeCheck out the thread here: http://slashdot.org/features/01/06/27/124207.shtml
And how about this tidbit from the link: "So he's in the switch and he's disgusted and horrified by how we have it configured, and I'm sure he's right. So I ask him, "Well, can you change all that?" I figure he'd say, "No, this your equipment, you fix it yourself," but he doesn't, he says, "Sure, what's the config password?" You gotta be kidding me, I must have dialed the wrong number here... this cannot be a tech support line... you can't actually get a tech support rep on a toll-free number simply to log in and fix your router setup while you whine at him on the phone... this is not real.So he's in the switch config and he's having a great time pointing out everything some of our people warned us about months ago. He tells me this is wrong, we shouldn't be doing this or that... "Well, then change it if you don't mind," I tell him. "Switch broke. Me dumb. You fix."
Ok, that's all fine, but Scott is still freaked out about how we have the switch configured. Soon I get a call from Barnaby, another hot shot Cisco tech rep. He just logged into our switch and he's horrified too. He wants to walk me through a total switch upgrade and cleanup right now. "Not tonight", I tell him, "I'm burnt and I need to consult some some network people over here before we mess with this any further.""
Ya your burnt, because you did it to your self! You wanna know why I don't get "burnt"? It's because I am competent and will take any chance to learn from any source before I assume I know it all
So when it comes to hiring, I will give preference to degreed and cert'd people first. I am not saying that I would pass up obvious talent that didn't but your chances are slimmed someone because if you come at me with an attitude that you are smart but just didn't "bother" I may just think your fucking lazy.
Darn my long, curly hair. I knew it was a problem, but I never knew that it sapped what little intelligence I had =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
My two cents on certifications...
Anyone can go to a "cram" session and obtain a certification. Even though I know nothing of the given subject (aside from what I crammed), the HR person interviewing me doesn't either. All the non-IT HR person sees is a shiny certification.
On the flip side, a lot of companies use certs as a "filter." If I have no certs, but a good deal of experience; a company may "filter" me out of the running based on that I have no certs. A human will probably never see my resume. Even though I'm more than qualified for the position.
So, I suppose in the end certs can be good and bad. While they're nice to have (if you have the cash and the time), they certainly shouldn't be used as a crutch. My office does face-to-face interviews with most qualified applicants. A cert won't grant, nor deny you a chance for a job. However, be prepared to have your knowledge tested should you advertise your cert in an interview.
Look,
There are certain communities they loves the "cert".
They're obsessed with it. Namely almost all Asian countries are like that.
Then, there are those good companies that wants to improve their success. SO they go for those who they think can help them get there by their experience, attitude etc.
Then, there are those that just cares about who will cop the shit when the dogs get let out. Those are the ones that cares a lot about certs.
To me, I'm cert. in somethings. But I don't write it down since I'm ashamed of it and I haven't gotten it "renewed".
You see, you have to "renew" these certs. which are completely useless in the real world. The "renewal" process is not education. Learning about things is education. Merely going to tests and paying company xxx $$$$ is not.
Experience in the field is much more valuable then certs.
Another thing to consider. Can you cert. any developers? How can you certify them?
TO test them if they know how to write if..then..else statements? Or to test them if they've got the right logic in their mind so they don't write redundant and weird logic into their code? Going by the norm, I would say the certs probably take the former.
I hope I got my point across
I think that all you losers out there that use brain dumps and cheat sheets to get certs should be shot. You are the ones that have made certs worthless and ruined it for the ones that actually used certs to show the experience that they have gained. This is why viruses run rampant and systems crash. Because you idiots with no knowledge are running systems that you really know nothing about. Way to go!
It is the same as a college degree. The whole purpose is to show that you are trainable and can learn. If you get some knowledge out of the process, that is only a bonus.
if they're so "incidental" why can't he just ignore them?
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
assuming I belong to a specially-protected class of people
:P
You assume you might not? You don't belong to a race? A gender? you don't have a sexual orientation? your age is undefined?
Or were you under the impression that only _some_ such groups were protected? While it's probably rarer for being white to be the subject of hiring discrimination, and gender discrimination might vary widely by field, that doesn't mean the protection isn't _there_
We've secretly replaced Slashdot with new Folgers Crystals - let's see if it notices.
True, those who are certified might not have any more a clue than those who never bothered with the test.
Now, let's take a little issue that's going to hit a lot of us where it hurts. A college education...
Many who graduate college, resent the fact they completely wasted their money, if infact their intentions were academic as they should have been. Not very many skills require much more than learning from a book and or consumer accessible and affordable equipment. Surgeons, might very well need "formal" training by an organization that has the wealth, clout and legal status to handle real human corpses. But a mathematician? A computer scientist? A philosopher? Not one mathematical concept, a math major might learn is only restricted to Harvard, Berkeley whereever. Even a state library of a town of only 1000 in the deep South amongst the very poor has enough math books to cover pretty much any knowledge a math major of any university could retain. So, as far as knowledge goes, college graduates might not enjoy realizing they wasted thousands of dollars and could have "enlightened" themselves for far cheaper as no library I ever visited had a cover charge.
So, what makes a degree or certificate important if they are fundamentally horsecrap in regards to academic retention and accomplishment with a dash of mental apptitude? Capitalism... one word, one idea that has put a severe dent in the quality of education from coast to coast, nation to nation continent to continent. 50 years ago, if any man had a degree in Chemistry... he was far more interested in "science" than any random man trying for a chem degree today (and if you say otherwise, in facing the norm, you're a bold faced liar). Today, odds are, the only reason the person claims he's interested in "science" is in hopes of a fat paycheck.
Who can blame him?
But, what I think has happened is the venture capitalists who invest money in companies. We really do have some idiots in America that just happened on enough money for serious investment, it's unbelievable how ignorant these people often are yet they drive around in Ferraris. Now, they want to make money, so they approach 'X' company. It's business, and so they will ask a lot of questions, some might seem personal, some might seem challanging or offensive but you have to ignore this becuase it's "business". They know absolutely nothing of the company or what it does other than it's "product"/"service" generates more money industry wide. So, for the sake of, 'We just want to see what we are buying!', they do know college degrees... and here is where acadamia takes the hit in quality. Becuase since they have no clue how to identify quality and skill, they have to rely on the faith of a college degree to imply that the company has "knowledgable" personal and isn't a bunch of pansies running about totally clueless. So, we have the domino effect. Companies want the money these morons want to give away, so they make effort to satisfy their concerns. Requiring college degrees to stare at the wall all day long... Then we have people who want those jobs, and the schools who want a good graduate rollout... next thing you know, an idiot is running down the street with a physics degree and couldn't ever explain why he tripped and bumped his head.
It's hard to identify what jobs should require a degree. A degree is supposed to imply a deep seeded interest in the subject, almost obssesive, but with a strong indication that the person happened to be distracted enough to take an interest in "college" which has nothing to do with "music", "math", "poetry"... But, other than obvious careers where to attain the skill would be very impractical for the average person to attain, then for all other jobs the only ones who should legally give preference to degreed applicants are those in Research and Development (where, they are actually researching and developing something groundbreaking and NEW. No, degree required for a chop shop simply being a systems integrator...)
But, that's my opinion on the matter, I'm certain many would disagree. (Oh, and I'm wasting money too as I'm currently in college. As I give my money, I say this, intellectually, it is a huge waste of time.)
huh huh huh he said butthat... huh huh huh huh
Here is the bad: where certifications are used as a tool for the wrong reason. About ten years ago, I had to get my CNE (Novell Netware) mostly because it was a requirement that someone in our company be a CNE for us to bid on network request for proposals. This was true even if the installation did not call for Netware. The sad fact is that a few years later, our company had another CNE that had never installed Netware, and had never even typed any commands on a console. This person bought his CNE via a golden parachute from another company.
Here is the good: We use certifications as a litmus test in conjunction with other criteria. For example, we think a CCNA is nothing to consider, but a CCNP with five years at a current systems integration company is not something to overlook. It is a decent enough pairing of validators to make people feel comfortable. Now, I work with some people that has zero certifications, but are knowledgeable at an expert level with networking technologies. However, you can see that from asking a few key questions and reviewing their 15 years of computer networking experience.
Now, the good and bad about computer science degrees are just the same. There are people that do well in school, enjoying the lifestyle college usually affords them, patiently learning literature and history, and following a rigid schedule. Some CS people get out of school and no practical knowledge, and hence are worthless. They cannot pick up concepts any faster than the person without a degree. Now, there are others with a wealth of knowledge at depth, but cannot apply that knowledge to troubleshoot problems or design networks or programs. And, there are others that have little collabrative abilities.
Myself, and some other people I work with, could not get through school. While there are many factors that contributed to us not getting degrees, we have all done fairly well. In many respects, we have bypassed what many have accomplished with degrees, at least in the circles of people we know. Certifications, for me at least, have been a way to counter the fact that I do not have a degree. I could tell a potential employer, "Yes, I was a physics major for a brief period at a university, but I left school due to personal reasons and did not return because I had an excellent opportunity to work for an Internet service provider. I started working with computers at a young age, and much was self-taught, or at least not instructed while I was in school. My interests have led to a career with more than fifteen years of computer networking experience. Certifications I hold include the Red Hat Linux Certified Engineer, Certified Novell Engineer (versions 3 through 5), and the Cisco Certified Network Administrator. One I have let lapse is the Compaq Accredited Systems Engineer. And, I am currently in pursuit of the CCNP and CCSP, having just recently found it interesting to work with Cisco equipment."
At this point, I do not find it difficult to maintain marketability of myself in the job market. I think that certfications have certainly helped me. I can see the point of the person with a CS degree begrudging employers wanting certifications, but it is important to them all along the chain. Companies sometimes work with vendors that want to speak with someone current with a certification, not someone with a 10-year old CS degree. I have had many bosses in the past with degrees that they have not used and live in the past, the computer world completely passing them by.
he didn't sort before piping into uniq.
not certified for that.
I was a self-motivated go-getter who learned programming independantly back in primary and high school. When I graduated from high school I tried to get a job, but without any work experience or formal training in the field, no one would give my resume a second look.
Once I got that degree, I got the first job I applied for.
Once my potential employers were happy that I had a degree, they were delighted about the fact that I had been programming for over a decade as a hobby before receiving any formal traing. But without that degree they didn't give a rats arse.
The problem is that most hirers don't think like you do, so we in the job market need to jump through hoops, like getting degrees and certifications, in order to get noticed.
While I agree that there are plenty of those "drones" as you put it with degrees and no real problem solving skills, there are certainly plenty of talented people out there who have gotten that degree.
All you have to do is have good communication skills and be able to find information and you can earn what i earn.
Come hire from Western Washington University's CS Department then.
Seriously, the above was a description of my first year.
FIRST year.
I don't know what the heck they are going to do to me next. o_O
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Well I am aiming for a dual major....
I was including classes in the 16 hours.
This is of course averaged out, I mean I can very well study my arse off until 2am in the morning 4 days of the week and sleep like a log the remaining 3.
I'd get a lot more sleep but people keep asking me questions.
Go awwaaay, I am trying to sleeeeeeep
The strangest thing I ever got asked was if I knew COBOL.
No.
(thankfully, or I would have people asking me questions on that too!)
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
is to weed out the majority of the fools. Some of the certs serve only as a paper chain to hold back people that simply are not willing to invest any effort.
I have four certifications, for servicing Apples. They are all required for what I do, and I cannot order parts from Apple without them.
Help Desk Specialist - lets just call this one the "have you ever used a computer in your life?" test. It's that easy. Really. Knowing what a macintosh looks like is purely optional.
Portable Tech: service techniques will help, but are purely optional to pass this test. More important to know differences between the various models like which one uses PC133 and which uses PC333.
Desktop Tech: as with Portable Tech, but sprinkle in some CRT safety that you have to know. Miss even one safety question and you fail. Other than that, still a piece of cake.
Technical Coordinator: Where did THAT truck come from? I thought these were easy tests? OK this one you will have to study for if you want to pass. Don't expect the answers to be in the studyguide either. I swear they really make some of that stuff up on the test.
Those are descriptions of the intial test. The recertifications are done online and are actually quite a measurable amount more difficult. The initial tests seem to be to find out what you know. The recerts are more a case of "what new information can you find, and how FAST can you find it?" You spend several hours keeping your web browser very very busy. It helps to have a friend onhand with another machine to help hunt information down as it is timed. If the test is indeed a measure of your ability to find information, it's more of a "who you know" than "what you know", so I don't see a problem with having an assistant.
I've heard from the PC techs that certs are much the same on their side of the fence. Things like A+ are borderline "you HAVE seen a computer before?" While things like CNE are "uh oh where are my books?" There doesn't seem to be much in between the gap though. Leads me to believe that there are really only two kinds of certs - the pushovers that are there to keep out the riffraff, and the REAL certs that prove you actually know a sizeable chunk about your field.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I've been administrating 'nix machines in a semi-large environment for several years now and would consider myself quite competent. At my current job we (the techs) will be taking a test that asserts how much we really know. For myself I'm more experienced than many of the others, but I learned a few neat tricks from studying. However, there are also many parts to the test that look to be simply archaic or not useful to what I do. Certainly I wouldn't touch sendmail with a 100-foot-pole (there are much better replacements out there) and any exam where you have to memorize flags and other details which would be very easily available from manyfiles or a --help option just doesn't sit well with me.
This is what the lpi ( http://www.lpi.org/ ) aims for.
It's not _free_, but at expos you can do an exam for something like 20 quid, which is pretty near free.
The Ginger Dog
I have been employed at base level (or in remarkably bad) positions in the computer industry since 1991. I don't have a degree and none of the employers I've had have allowed me time off or sufficient income to afford any of the certifications.
At this point I'm screwed. I'd LOVE to be working - but I can't even prove anything because I worked for a run of really, really, really bad employers. The best of the bunch are closed now and the worst had their main offices burn down (they were in a really poorly built building. There were a couple cool people working there and I hope they're doing well wherever). *sigh*
Certification or a degree would make my chances better. I've worked with most of the technology around here before certification existed. And it's not like I've stopped.
Oh well. Now I'm taking my chances on a new startup based on MacOSX programming, and having fun doing it. I may not have an income above local social assistance, but at least I'm programming and system administrating. *sigh*
I repeat - certification and degrees are GREAT. They let you in the door. The one that keeps slamming in my face.
I guess you're missing the point.
Microsoft, with Bill Gates as their spiritual leader, is an up-and-coming religion. They're already almost as rich and powerful as the Vatican.
Linux, with Linux Torvalds as their spiritual leader, is also a religion now. They're the new atheists, heretics, agnostics, humanists, and pretty much anything else that'll get you burned at the steak.
Mmmmm steak.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
I'd hire them in a heartbeat! Creativity is a valuable skill, and their experience will certainly be useful!
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Disclaimer: I'm the Certification Manager @ MySQL AB
If all you see in a certification is a piece of paper, then it's pretty obvious why you don't see it as being worth the paper on which it's printed.
Luckily, many people - and most especially those in the HR department and the managers you want to hire you - can see beyond this.
Getting certified is a process you go through: training, studying and gaining experience. Then you go to take the exam and get the paper. You are not a better developer for having a certification exam than the next guy. But if you do go through the certification process, I guarantee you that you are a better developer than before you started the process of getting certified. Even if all you did was to sit down and read through the curriculum, I'll bet that you discovered details about the subject that you were never aware of, or had previously ignored or worked around.
Why do corporations require you to get certified? For much the same reasons that we, as a society, require people to have a driver's license before they get into a car and start roaming the streets. A driver's license is no guarantee that we won't get into an accident, and we all know lousy drivers, and wonder how they ever got their license. But few of us would want to make away with the licensing scheme, simply because we know that, in the overall scheme of things, requiring everyone to have a license will sharply reduce the number of accidents that happen on our roads. Driver's licenses aren't perfect, but it's a simple and effective method to keep down the number of accidents that occur on a yearly basis.
And for much the same reason, managers require certification: A certification does not guarantee that you won't hose the database or that you won't pull the wrong plug while repairing machines in the data center. But they sharply reduce the likelihood of that happening.
There's another reason why you should get certified, and that is to validate the training you get. I can't help wondering why it is that individuals and companies are willing to fork over tons of money to get their staff through training, yet they do not offer the bit extra to get the certifications in place. Really, certification is often the only metric you have available for validating that the money you paid for training yourself or your staff were well spent. From the employer's perspective, adding a requirement of certification to training has the added benefit that the ones taking part in the training will not only stay awake and pay attention during the course; they will also review the materials afterward, giving the most value for the training money.
The reason for certifications is because the IT realm failed to regulate itself and set high standards. For example, in Medical and Legal fields to practice you need to have both a college education and pass a state and somtimes a national board. Self study is not accepted, thus, in doing so set a standard for employers and customers to judge a person's qualifications. In Information Technology, since there are no state or nation boards, and frankly ALL college IT programs are really sub-standard, the only way to determine an IT Professional's worht is thru certifications. Personally I would rather have to pass one state or national board than trying to keep up the the 30 something certifications I must obtain in order to keep my job. IMHO Liger-Zero
I have been working in I.T. since 1998, after graduating from three years in a community college taking Computer Service Technician (2 year diploma) and Computer Network Technology (advanced diploma).
I had the chance to get my A+, CNA, to join SCETTINS, and several other things through my course, but of course you had to pay for it.
As a struggling just out of college young person, I didn't have the $$$ to get those certs.
Having them may or may not have helped me in the job hunt, but my first job was a Network Administrator. I didn't meet their "qualifications" but I aced the interview and got the job.
Once you get a job, and get some experience under your belt, I think certs become less and less important, as long as you can show you have a working knowledge of the subject at hand during your interview.
So to sum up this rambling... Certs without experience give you an edge in the job hunt, but once you get some practical experience, those certs become less important. (IMHO)
'Twixt Light and Darkness... S S H A D O W
I got all 6 MCSE certs in a month in 1996 (or was it 7). Although I didn't really learn anything (I knew the stuff already), it gave me instant crediblity on the corparate meat market, and launched me on a sucessful consulting career.
But MCSE were fairly rare back then. "Supply and Demand" rules everywhere. Now it is not worth nearly as much.
For example I think the new MS Solution Architect cert will be worth something for awhile, once it goes live.
You are an idiot. I will take the experienced person with certs' vs. the experienced person without. About once a year this thread gets started up by someone WITHOUT any certification. I have met alot more fuck-ups w/o certs than I have with. Basically the people that are anti certs are the people w/o. Funny...
Actually I went to the University of Maryland College Park. I attended on campus. In case you care to check it out, the University of Maryland is rated one of the top ten in the nation for Computer Science.
Most people in masters programs are usually only in them so they can avoid joining the work force where they might actually be held accountable for their incompetence, or so they can feel justified in spouting off such drivel as seen in your post because they know everything.
I have been in the work force for almost 15 years and in that time have dealt with numerous holders of various "certifications". I have found almost all of them lacking, since they do not know some of the fundamentals. You'll also note that I didn't say "every IT professional on [E]arth" (you're supposed to capitalize when referring to the planet, btw) I said "*most* people who *only* have certs are idiots" not all.
In addition, I have been personally recognized by many of the employers that I have worked for as a top performer in the field.
I understand how you, most likely being a certificate holder yourself, might feel some animosity towards someone who points out the truth. You have my sympathies.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
if you're working more than 8-10 hours a day, not only are you simply being exploited, your productivity is going down the tubes.
80 hour work weeks are by far NOT the norm. If you're doing it in IT, it's because you're not doing IT right.
Since the mid 1990's, quite a few new certs came out, CISSP, RHCE and others. Most if not all of these certs have severe penalties if you publish the answers to the tests. With RedHat your not even allowed to discuss the test with anyone else, including other students. If you do, they can take your cert away and you can't get it back nor take any other course. They really want people to know what they are doing so the cert means something. Today I would hire a RHCE over a MSCE anytime.
Certs are indicators that employers use to assess the ability of the candidate to perform the job they are seeking to fill. The guy doing the hiring most of the time doesn't know this stuff. I have had inteviewers that knew exactly what they were doing and they are very good at this stuff. That is always in the Unix world though. Windows world most of the managers are totally ignorant. Tell them you met with the Marie Antoinette last week and they would believe you (she lost her head years ago).
So comes the question, are they worth it? In a word for most courses - yes. Most courses that offer a cert are not big money makers for the company. I'm sure some organizations make big money on them but for most of the ones that I'm familiar with, they make a modest amount on them. They do teach the people a lot in a short amount of time and they are better at solving problems. Even seasoned self taught people learn things going to these courses. Sometimes they learn a much easier way of doing what they are already doing. One guy I thought was very comical at what he went through to get something done, I reduced it all to a one line command.
So it is up to you. You have to do something to convince the guy doing the hiring that you are a better bet than the other resumes he has on his desk. By the way, if you apply to a large corporation that has a HR department, feel free to check back with them. That is because when you do that, you raise your resume to the top of the pile and they don't mind it. Don't call too often though as to piss them off. If you get a sorry Charlie letter, feel free to send it in again even if they say they will keep it on file. Again, keep it in front of them. Out of site, out of mind. I know, I used to work in Personnel for DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) back when I was a student with no money. Some of you guys think that people that work in Personnel are as dumb as a pile of rocks. No doubt I'm sure some personnel departments are (I have delt with them too), however most seem to do a good job. They see one job opening, sometimes no resumes to 1000 resumes - have to thin them down or get more applicants somehow.
Things to remember:
Ok, so many people think that certs are just bits of paper and that there worth is dubious. I disagree, because many of those negative arguments are based on very subjective experiences and a general cynacism of the IT test industry, and as true as those examples may be, they do not apply to the actual theoretical advantage ot IT tests. If you look at IT tests objectively then the following point becomes apparent: - Reading course material/attending a course and then doing the required study to be able to pass a test *does* impart knowledge. You cannot deny the fact that you learn enough, and manage to retain it in long-term memory well enough, to pass the test. Yes, Test centres and IT firms make money out of you. Yes, some people who have never worked in the industry can manage to pass the tests and they are not as experienced as non-certified veterans, but if I interviewed a candidate who had several years job experience *and* a certificate, then i'd take that candidate over one who had the same level of experience and no certificate. If a college grad gets an IT cert, he has no experience, but he has been trained and if they landed a job doing just that subject, they would quickly gain the experience--assuming they are not morons. You'll always get morons who have the skills to get certified but are completely useless at the job, but that may be down to many other factors, and not just their skill set. What i'm saying is that you can't judge certification based on subjective examples of bad employees/college students who have become certified. Certification is a good means of showing that in addition to your experience, you have managed to display a certain standard of knowledge. Compare it to the national education system..."Yeah, I went to school and studied for some years but I didn't do the exams, but man, i've got sooo much experience". It doesn't hold any water does it? You go to school to pass exams to show that you have reached a certain standard. I'm not saying that tests are the last word. There'll always be people out there with no certs who are absolute experts, but that doesn't mean to say that there aren't also those sysadmins etc out there who are pretty good at a few areas of being a sysadmin, but have no expertise in other essential areas. If a newbie took a "sysadmin" test (yes, I know it's a bit general), where the newbie was trained in all areas and managed to pass a test that displayed he had remembered that knowledge then considering all other things being equal, he would be a strong contender to the 'experienced' sysadmin.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
Nice job with "résumé". I'm impressed. (Did I mention I'm a grammar whore?)
That said, while I'm sure you're being tongue-in-cheek, I'm going to answer this anyway. Earlier up on my resume, there's reference to Microsoft products and Windows work. I've done it; like I said, paying rent was a priority. So if you're going to compare Microsoft to Enron (slightly different, but I do like that metaphor, so I'll let it pass), you'd have already binned my resume and cover letter.
But practically, I don't think most of the hiring managers that would be interested in me are going to do that. Most understand that there is rent to be paid and food to be eaten; most also understand that my locale is not a Unix market. Some of them even appreciate that, while I am an idealist, I am not an evangelist; I will tell you what I think and advocate the best technical solution, but in the end, you're the one who's paying me and I will implement what you say to implement.
Of course, that does not prohibit me from going home and sending out cover letters afterwards.
I did an MCSA at one of those fly-by-night training schools, and while I studied hard and passed my exams when I got a *real* job, I was shocked at how much I didn't know! (I have been making up for that since!)
My first IT job was sysadmin at a company that SELLS IT training, and this gave me a huge insight into how much of a *scam* IT training is. Hard selling, cold calling, incorrect information ("Never touched a computer before? Well, that's OK you can still pass the CCNA in three months!" "Ping is the language computers use to talk to each other" - I kid you not). The training material was mostly inaccurate and the prices were inflated to about 300% of what the training CDs actually cost. Nobody actually cared whether a course was suitable for a candidate - it was all about selling the most expensive stuff as much as possible.
The fact is that neither the vendors who design the vendor-specific exams or the shysters who sell them *care* about you or your career. They're just out to make money. The certs worth doing are the vendor-neutral CompTIA (A+, Net+, Security+ etc) as they actually teach the underlying technology not just the "point-and-click" sequence of the M$ crap.
"Life is pain Highness. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something"
Westly, The Princess Bride
Do you have certifications? No.
How do employers, employees and management feel about them? No one in my department at any of the companies I've worked for considered a certification worth anything. With the possible exception of Cisco certifications, but even then it was mostly that a network guy working for us wanted them. I can't remember if the company paid for his or not.
A good pragmatic answer.
I guess my point is that, right or wrong, I associate MCP and MCSE and the like with people who have bought in to the whole scam and drunk the Microsoft Kool-Aid; people who will push a Windows/Microsoft solution over all others, even when it's technically unwise.
Merely having extensive experience with Microsoft products isn't a problem--in fact, in this industry it's practically a requirement for any job. However, paying for Microsoft-approved certification, I think, goes beyond that and enters the realm of propping up the whole edifice. It indicates a willingness to stand up and be counted as a Microsoft supporter.
Then again, I've never had to choose between working for Microsoft or living in a cardboard box. Whereas I know people who have gotten close to that point.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I have neither a certification from a major vendor nor a CS degree. And I'm asked time and again how/why I got my computer skills.
I can only agree with this poster. I've been using and learning to work with various things computer related since I was 5 years old. Now I'm 24, but I can't find a job in IT, since I don't have a CS or a cert. You can't even prove you skills. I tried, a lot...
If HR doesn't see the acronyms they love so much, you simply don't stand a chance!
I'm starting to loose my interest, another illusion in my life. Now I was thinking of getting a cert in order to have a "piece of paper", in order to get even slightly access to a IT company. But as far as I have read here, most people see certs as worthless pieces of paper, acquired by people who happen to love learning questions out of their head in order to pass the exam.
It doesn't surprise me that the negative point of view comes from those who have a CS.
If I can't get somewhere without taking university classes for at least 4 years, since certs aren't worth it, I can only quit. I'll just stay with my Sociology "piece of paper" from then on. Too bad certs form a good alternative to those who can't get a CS but are viewed in such a negative spotlight. No wonder IT has a negative image.
I give massages and reiki treatments (for real!). More info here: http://www.universele-levensenergie.be
All I can say is thank goodness for spellchecking ;)
Now go ehway or I shall tauntu a second timeh!
if they're so "incidental" why can't he just ignore them?
If you bothered to continue reading, I wrote, "Certs, education, experience, are all pretty incidental. What counts is demonstrating you can do the job and do it well. What works here, however, would not work everywhere. In some places certs are a plus, in others a minus."
He apparently works in a situation where he believes the presence of certs on a resume is a useful predictor of undesired characteristics. Since presumably neither of us work at the same place as the person who made that comment, what basis would we have for saying that he is wrong in his assessment?
certs only mean something to HR and management that has not worked in the trenches and have not taken any of these exams to realize they dont teach you much about real world scenarios.
In 15 years in the software industry, I've never been asked once for a certification in anything. If I were to be asked, I would take it as a really strong sign that I wouldn't like working for whoever was asking. To me, this is the cert's only purpose: to act as a litmus test for detecting companies that are overmanaged.
To the unwashed masses, it will make no sense and make them suspicious. They will wonder why such an obvious element of merit is being used to disqualify someone. Their ignorance and lack of understanding will make them view the situation naievely. Viewed naievely, the situation would infact be suspicous.
Your response is a good example of why egregious tort claims happen. Arrogant idiots like you end up on the defense side and completely fail to argue appropriately to the given audience.
Should you wish to whine about the recent Vioxx verdict, find a mirror.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The material on the site seems to be user-contributed and not vetted in any way for accuracy. People who think they're "da bomb" in network administration or databases, and who don't have a clue, are posting their opinions as fact.
Anyone who uses this site to prep for a test is setting themselves up to fail, IMO.
What is the point of having a driver's liscence when you can learn to drive without one? Why bother having a high school diploma when you can just learn stuff at home?
It's not to help yourself. it's to prove to someone else that you know what you're talking about. And no, it's not a perfect system, but it's better than relying on people's honesty.
"Yes sir. I know a great deal about networking I sure so" isn't going to cut it. And potential employers can't exactly ask you to tell them what you know because if I walked up to my boss and said that in order to make a network happen we'd have to invert the power matrix and run it through the main deflector dish he's assume I was right.
Bosses don't know dick about computing. Certificated prove that you knew it on one day. Or at least i ncrease the liklihood.
I've been thinking about this very thing the past few days. Within the past few months, I have taken, and passed, the CISSP exam (just waiting for experience). However, I have yet to see any incentive from my employer for it. I had to pay out of pocket for the exam, and received a reimbursement only after showing I passed. Also, other coworkers of mine that have gotten the full certification have not seen anything out of it. I've been wanting to go for another cert, perhaps MCSE, but I'm starting to feel my time would be better spent getting real, hands-on experience. Maybe doing some contract work on the side or something.
It seems everywhere I look for jobs, companies want X years of experience before hiring you full-time. I find it difficult to get experience in a certain area of IT (e.g., programming) without getting hired into a programming position. You can always go for various programming certifications, but in the end, it's just more education. It still doesn't show that you can actually DO the job, just that you test well on the concepts. Seems I need to concentrate more on getting experience than getting certifications.
Having a smoking section in a public restaurant is like having a peeing section in a public swimming pool.