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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.
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.
...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?
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.
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?
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 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
"But I never understood the need for certification"
:) Then, not only can your skills do the talking, but you can claim certification, on top of that, too, which can only be a plus for you.
:)
Sometimes, certification isn't for you - it's for your employer, and their customers. Unfair as it may appear to you, it establishes a baseline, one which I'm sure you far surpass.
"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."
No offense, but, if you're as good as you think, then certainly you should be able to pass some "prefab tests that any monkey could study for and pass"? And, I'm sure your company would be pleased not to have to pay to send you for training, but simply pay for those tests you can pass simply because you're so good?
If you're self-employed, then, not only do you get a certification, but, the costs are a tax write-off, too.
Just a thought: Why not try? Certainly, if some monkey can pass them, you should be able to as well.
There's only one way to find out
You graduated in 2000, yet you're so uber skilled that you don't think you need to be certified?
Hell, I've been doing computer service for over 20 years, I GREW UP with the PC industry [1], learned it as I went as did many others of my generation, and I STILL take tests, mostly to re-certify, and am often surprised by what I don't know, as I tend to take them cold since I rarely have time now to study (and, I like to see what I've learned, by experience, and compare that to what I don't know, against what they're testing for.. and many times, I learn new things that way, which I always enjoy).
Regards,
dj
[1] Started as a technician, in 1986, doing field service for a local PC sales and service company. Installed my first PC-based LAN in 1987. Server was an IBM PC-AT, 8 Mhz (the "fast" one, *grin*). Had a Seagate ST-4096 80 MB MFM drive, and we had to replace the BIOS on the motherboard, with EPROMS whose drive table we'd altered to support the drive natively, as IBM didn't support it... there wasn't such a thing as user-settable hard drive parameters back then.
Oh, and the NOS was NetWare 286, v2.0a. Compiled it myself, from copies of the masters... and does anyone besides me remember COMPSURF? *grin*
Ethernet was 'way too expensive back back then for our customers (small-medium sized companies)... we used ARCNET, running on coax... and while it was "only" 2.5 Mbps, it was token-based, and scaled well as node population per segment increased... unlike Ethernet, at that time, which didn't have switches available to mitigate collisions.
Now, of course, everyone calls Ethernet switches "hubs", even though they aren't... and we all ignore the performance loss that results from a collision-based topology, 'cause the hardware handles it, pretty much transparently now... except when it doesn't.
But, I'd be willing to bet, that as network speeds scale, eventually, collision-based Ethernet will be replaced with something that is non-collision based - probably token-passing based... but, it'll probably still be called "Ethernet", so as to placate the masses.
However, I'm wandering now.
Guess the last thing I'd say is this: If you're so good, go get certified... costs you nothing to do so, really.
And, it proves that you're at least as good as those that just passed
Me, I had the EXACT same attitude as you, back in 1992... I'd already been doing NetWare network installs for over 5 years by that point... why should I get certified?
Well, my boss wanted to become a Novell Reseller... and, that meant that someone had to get certified.
So, I did: He was cheap, and wouldn't pay for training... so, I just went and took the tests. They weren't offered in our city, so, I had to drive an hour and a half to where they were available... and, since I was the head tech, I couldn't stay away l