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IT Certification Less Important Now?
lpq writes "IT certifications, popular after the dot-com bust, seem to be hurting careers now according to this article in the current Eweek.com issue. Guess employers are getting hip to the idea that those who don't have experience or can't "do", get certified..."
Some companies like people with certs. Some don't.
Some companies like people with advanced degrees. Some don't.
Some companies like people in suits. Some don't.
Do what you want, be how you want, and network. That's how you get a job (and more likely how you get one that you'll fit into).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
That could indicate that certifications are less important to these companies... if they were all getting paid the same salary at the beginning of the six month period. But since we don't have that information, this study is pretty much worthless...
"This is a clear indication that employers are not placing the same emphasis on certification that they once did.
I wish I got paid to make ridiculous statements...
I really would tend to agree with this. I graduated in 2k right before the bubble burst. Flying high doing the consulting gig, had a grand time. But I never understood the need for certification - my old company pimped several that they wanted to push (siebel, etc.) but I pushed back. Seemed like a waste of my time. I preferred (and still prefer) to let my skills do the talking instead of jacking around taking some prefab test that any monkey could study for and pass. ymmv. (btw, sorry for the FP. seriously, my first evar. promise i won't do it again. heh.) -BCM aka brian welch
It depends what you're looking for. If you're hiring based primarily on COST, go for the cert. If you're hiring based on PERFORMANCE- go for the degree holder. He'll cost you more per year- but less per project.
In other words, this is the cheap labor debate all over again. Those who are short sighted (looking only at the money-per-unit-of-time number) will go for the cert still.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
It all comes down to who is making the decision. I have found in research and university settings the people doing the interviewing and making the hiring decisions are well aquatinted with the details and technology involved. Thus, they can effectively interview someone and make an informed decision on how much competence that person may or may not posses.
Contrast to many (not all) businesses, especially large ones, where techno-clueless HR reps or upper level management are handling this duty. They cannot tell the difference between someone who can BS a bunch of buzzwords and someone who actually knows what they are talking about, so certifications are their crutch.
In hiring decisions I have been involved in, MCSE was sometimes viewed negatively. Not because of any anti-MS bias, but because generally people who cheerlead that aspect of their resume seem to have little else to offer.
Finkployd
No, and if you read the article it doesn't really say that certification is hurting anyone, just that they're not worth as much as they once were.
I suppose if you factor in the opportunity cost of getting a certification (versus doing something else with that time that's more "real world" experience) maybe it could be thought of as 'hurting' you, but I didn't see any indication that people are paying less for certified employees than uncertified ones. They're just not paying more.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
...the value depends on the credibility of the certifying authority. Microsoft Certifications have become almost worthless because MS was printing money with the MCP program in the 1990's. Now the tests are (a little) harder, but the barrier to getting certified is still really low in the MS world. Result? MCSE is basically worthless to have these days.
On the other hand, TFA points out the going-rate for certain Cisco certifications is on the rise. Not coincidentally, some of the Cisco certs they refer to are among the hardest to get. MCPs are easy to get, are more common, and thus do not denote any exceptional level of expertise.
Of course, I'd rather hire somebody with a mile-long list of successful projects they've accomplished than an alphabet-soup of certifications. In every hiring scenario I've been involved in so-far, I have always put the people who have DONE something ahead of the certification monkeys. Of crouse, if somebody with experience and "hard" certifications comes along, it doesn't hurt matters.
Who did what now?
Who wants to pay for a M$ qualification every six months? I know I don't. If you really want to impress employers, get a computing degree, and perhaps join a professional organisation like the British Computer Society. At least then, you'll have letters after your name in a non-proprietary format, and be able to have a chat in a BCS forum when you feel like it. (If you want to).
This has certainly helped me out in the past (especially 'whipping out' my BCS membership card in an interview). Personally, I'd feel embarrassed mentioning any M$-accredited qualifications to a prospective employer, but each to their own.
...where I am at now I can't even get looked at without a Bachellors degree at a minimum ...
It is obviously very unlikely that you hold a college degree.
Skills and expirence always trump paper.
But paper often gets you in the door for the interview.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this discussion... EVERY time this comes up on slashdot, people make the same stupid assumptions and generalizations and trot out the same tired lines.
".. those who don't' have experience or can't "do", get certified...""
Yes, I'm sure they do... but SO DO plenty of people who CAN "do." This is not an "either / or" situation people, where you either have experience, are smart/talented/whatever, OR you get certified. Some very smart, talented people realize that *some* employers do put significant weight on paper credentials, and choose to get certified as just one more part of the overall picture.
Evaluating job candidates is, at best, very difficult... any tool that give an employer any visibility into a candidates abilities is a Good Thing, IMO. No, just being certified by itself doesn't mean you get the job... but if you have to weigh two otherwise equally qualified candidates, and one has passed a difficult certification exam and one hasn't, maybe that tips the balance. Or maybe you have a guy with 2 associate degrees, two relevant certifications, and 4 years of experience, vs. a guy with a bachelors degree who's just out of school... it's not an obvious choice... again, you have to look at the *whole* picture.
Are certifications a panachea; for employers or employees? No, but to suggest that they have no value is just ignorant.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Real UNIX typically doesn't include BASH ;)
In college psych there are 3 things I still reference on a daily basis. One of the biggies was, correlation isn't causation. You are right, just because the average person with a cert might make less than those without does not mean certs cause you to make less.
During the last few years there have been many diploma mills out there. What these numbers lead me to believe are those with real skills didn't have any need to prove it with a 6 week class and a cert. However, this isn't always true. We get up to 5% a year bonus for certs at my job. So most people assume to take one or two a year for that reason.
Certs aren't inherently bad. They are just a symbol of aquired knowledge. By that line of reasoning they are no more fundamentally evil than a degree from a state university. However, in practice, these short term training programs became about who paid most for questions closest to the real test.
I could throw in a antecdotal story of someone having cert x and being dumb as a rock, but I don't really need to. We all know one. And if you don't know one, you probably are that person. 2-8 week cert programs were a fad that HR depts ate up like so much confection spread upon my naked body. It couldn't last forever. PHB's are starting to realize Microsoft certs are a dime a dozen, Novell certs are losing steam (they are changing markets too quick and their customers aren't keeping up with their training), and Cisco certs are still somewhat valueable. But what is valueable now (and will probably always be valueable in the long term) is experiance.
Just a side note... Has anyone seen those Vonage ads on slashdot pwning the fad technologies of the week? It's nice to see sed and awk are still in style 8-)
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
unfortunately, the article is really a little thin on what those skills are
Obviously the most important skill to have is the skill to determine what skills companies look for in potential employees.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
Personally, I do agree that scraps of paper are best left for janitors. (I don't have anything against janitors, but they're paid to pick up paper, I'm paid to develop software.) That's not the same as saying that people shouldn't learn new skills. I believe that technology advances fast enough that anyone who is working full-time is physically incapable of learning at the necessary pace at the same time and therefore companies should pay for a sabatical to get people back up to speed.
(I also believe that stagnation is why many people do their best work shortly after leaving college and then just brain-rot in-situ for the rest of their career. Sure, the brain is at peak efficiency in the mid-20s to early 30s, but good mental exercise and a strong drive to stay fresh should keep the brain useful maybe even into a person's 40s.)
Certifications, as "proof" of skills, are worthless as they really show very little more than your ability to regurgitate some standard set piece of information. The battery test for ANY examination is whether you could modify "Eliza" or "Animals" - two very primitive decision-based systems - to pass the exam using nothing more than the course material. If the answer is "yes", then the examination requires no actual thought or understanding. A skill, as opposed to mechanical labour, requires a high level of thought and understanding.
(This is not to under-value so-called "working-class" folk - I sincerely question whether they are "working-class" because that is where they want to be or because that is where society has placed them. Sure, some will enjoy mechanical work, but I doubt in anything like the numbers that are there. Besides, society can't afford to have people do low-grade work. To keep the US and Europe solvent, we need a much higher percentage of people in highly skilled work. Although ignorance is not the same as stupidity, we really can't afford either, but we can afford ignorance far less.)
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)
A bachelor degree means 4 years of a wide variety of courses and grades from a variety of professors.
Considering the number of deadweight lab partners I had, who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, but were quite excellent at reading the book and regurgitating for the test the sort of knowledge that is only useful in the context of the actual application which they were incapable of, I myself have little or no faith in a simple degree. A lot of people graduated higher in their class than I did, but most people didn't do four years in two.
In short, the ability to pass a practical skills test trumps any and all pieces of paper, short of the doctoral level. I'd much rather an excellent programmer with no formal education (not the kind with weird ass logic loops and utterly non-standard syntax...a good one), than someone with a bs BS who can't do anything but wave his diploma around.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
That is a little silly, man. I mean, I don't know how to do that, but I do know where to look. Knowing where to find answers is the most vital part of being a sysadmin in the linux/unix world, because you can never know everything, and every company has their own special way of doing things.
It's the same thing about programming. Learning to program, and learning how to program in XYZ are two different things. T
sig?
But many people who screen applicants are complete imbeciles.
I have worked in IT over 25 years, and that is something I know for a fact.
Let me know which school you went to and I'll be sure to not hire anyone from there without testing them heavily first. Don't generalize your experience at one bad school to the entire higher education system.
Developers: We can use your help.
I give no credit at all to interviewees with certifications. And people with Microsoft certifications I usually won't bother interviewing at all. They come in knowing nothing. I give credit to college degrees and experience.
Then you're going to end up tossing out a lot of qualified people just to prove a point. I carry certifications, but they're not for the hiring manager. In the last couple of years, I haven't talked to many companies that didn't at least do first-level screenings through their HR departments. These people have no idea what's valuable in an IT job, so they have a simple checklist given to them. The problem is, these checklists have become the basis for ALL applicants, regardless of experience. Unless you match that checklist perfectly, you don't even get to talk to someone who knows or understands what you need to know.
My resume documents 20 years of experience in a wide range of technologies and industries, with millions of dollars of savings to companies calculated and clearly laid out. When I lost my job a few years back, I spent months completely unable to get even a phone interview. I decided to make best use of my time and get a couple of those stupid-ass certs, in the hopes that it would provide more opportunities. I took all of the tests and passed them on the first try with very little preparation (I took practice tests to ensure I wasn't going to be tripped up on "wording", a problem I learned years ago when I worked with a trainer who explained the problems in cert testing). I was then fighting to keep up with the calls and got to pick and choose where I went next to work. The only change I made was the addition of a few letters at the very top of the first page (MCSE, RHCE, CCA, etc).
Oh, and I don't have a degree, either. I started, but decided quickly that spending $100,000 and four years so I could take 8 classes that were loosely connected to my field from five years prior was a significant waste of time, effort and money. That's a decision I have never regretted. Sure, I've been passed over for jobs because I didn't have one (for the same reasons you pass over certed people), but I can live with that. Regardless of the type of paper a person has, that paper does nothing to prove they know what they're doing and some people just get it to get past the twits who can't see anything past it.
Does that mean people with certs are going to be (more) qualified? Hardly. When people ask me about my certs I tell them the same thing each time: "I place more value on the napkin I used at lunch than the certs I have buried in the bottom of one of my filing cabinets. THAT piece of paper provided me with real, tangible, immediate benefit and didn't cost me a few hundred dollars." You really should start actually looking at the resumes and calling references. Otherwise you're no better than the HR drones; incapable of making a real decision based on facts.
Which is more painful? Going to work or gouging your eye out with a spoon? Find out!
http://www.workorspoon.com
I've looked at Courier, and I don't use it specifically because it's a piece of crap. And I wouldn't use shell script to write something that was supposed to build and e-mail reports--I'd use a more sensible tool, like Ruby or Perl.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I remember when I got my first web development job. I had the skills but no experience, and a piece of paper from a closed school in another country. The interview consisted of 10 minutes of chatting, after which they asked me to implement a simple web app that did reads, inserts, updates and deletes on a database. I asked if they minded me using the reference bookshelf in the process, as I was a little rusty, and it wasn't a problem. I skimmed through the books, refreshed my memory, and had the thing built in about twenty minutes... it wasn't particularly challenging, particularly when I had the books on hand.
I was the last of seven applicants, and the only one without a university degree in computer science. I was also the only one to complete the project. From what I was told, it took all the other applicants with their certifications at least 6 hours to not succeed in a simple task that they weren't familiar with. I got hired on the spot.
Certifications don't mean shit. If I was hiring someone, I'd be looking at their project experience. What I'd be looking for is a series of successful projects that were NOT all the same. THAT is what demonstrates your capacity to fix problems.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Does an MD guarantee a great physician? Does a JD guarantee a great lawyer? Does an MBA guarantee a business man? Need I go on?
If somebody in high school (for whatever reason) wants to be a computer tech; 90% of the posters here on slashdot, would post that five years of experience is much more valuable than an A+ cert. Well duh, thanks for being so insightful, and all. But how is somebody supposed to get started?
Practically every real profession relies on degrees, certs, licenses, and the like. IT has always been a major exception.
Then the IT pros piss and moan about how their not treated like real professionals, and certainly not paid like other professionals. Imagine if a BSEE was optional for an electrical engineer.
You can't just hire somebody off the street to fix your toilet, or clean your swimming pool. Those jobs require licenses, certs, etc. But, hiring somebody to write life-and-death critic software, whose only credential is that he's the PHB's nephew . . . hell, that's done all the time.
...but I self studied nearly everything in the carricilum in ~4 months.
...You can't go to collage and major in competence.
But you do learn how to spell, among other things...
Honestly, if you think you learned everything in 4 months, more power to you, but to alot of people, the point of college is to learn how to think right, and work in groups. You may have the knowlege gained in college, but the wisdom from working with other people, from following a pattern that may feel really slow, from dealing with all that crap everyone complains about, but must be done.
I read somewhere the following about being a Systems Admin:
....or something like that.
Systems Administation is about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know and figuring out how to know what you don't know.
Ideally, what you want is for the basic pay of the lowest paid to be comparable to the cost of living at an acceptable standard. (By that, I mean you can get an apartment that shouldn't be condemned, you can afford to meet your nutritional requirements, you can meet reasonable medical expenses, that sort of thing.) At present, there are many below "minimum wage" workers in the US who probably earn half to a third of what I consider an acceptable minimum.
True, there will always be a bottom of the pyramid. That is why you want automation. Machines don't need much, so put them at the bottom and raise humans to a more human level. It's not a perfect solution. I don't have any perfect solutions. But as a temporary fix, whilst society figures out what a perfect solution would look like, it sounds a lot better than what we have now.
When it comes to degrees and certifications, I do understand why rarity affects value. Again, it is supply and demand. On the other hand, breadth and depth of knowledge defines understanding. Merely knowing a formula by rote is nothing more than alchemy or religious indoctrination. It doesn't tell you anything of substance and the moment you fall outside of the straight and narrow, your knowledge becomes worthless.
(This is true of ANY educational program. I am definitely much more in favour of "Classical" or "Renaissance" thinking there, where context and diversity of knowledge was of the utmost importance. "Modern" education does better on the depth, which is important too. Knowing everything about nothing is just as useless as knowing nothing about everything.)
I'd prefer a system that provided continuous education and rolling tests throughout a person's life, or at least provide sabbaticals to approximate that. That way, you can dispense with a lot of the redundancies in the degree program and you can link certifications to a significant quality and quantity of knowledge.
I believe Britain has something like 60% of the population go through the University system now. That's not a bad start, provided the diversity is great enough that the degree has no value. It seems to work OK, but there are still more areas that need work than don't.
(By comparison, there are States in America which barely manage to get 54% of their population to even graduate High School. And, no, that's not because American standards are higher, when something like a third of those can't even find America on a map!)
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)
Last time I bothered with a certification, I'd been out of work for a month or so and not having many decent hits on the job boards. So I snagged a copy of Solaris x86 and studied up on the new features of Solaris 8 and took the certification exams. And my resume hit percentage went up. But my experience has been that having those certifications is what gets you past the gatekeepers in HR, once you get to the actual hiring manager is when your experience will get vetted. And I've nuked someone after their resume listed "Solaris Certification" and they couldn't answer basic questions about disk slicing, turns out it wasn't a Sun certification, but something offered by a local community college... So, if *I* will see your resume, expect me to ask questions that pertain to what your certification is in...
Someone capable of working a shell prompt could also be a wiz at DOS. Note, never touching unix does not mean unable to work a text based shell or os.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
The trouble is, if they lied to get the job, what else will they lie about?
Do they keep company secrets, or only until the payoff/blackmail is big enough? (e.g. If you don't tell me I'll let your employer know that you lied on your resume.)
Do they work when they say they do?
Is all the work claimed by them actually done by them?
I know that one lie doesn't guarantee another, but if you don't think that one lie makes another then you're an easy mark.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I bet the people on here that say "certs are meaningless and trivial to acquire" don't have any. Take MS' 70-291 without studying...let us know when you pass.