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Ask Slashdot: Best Certifications To Get?
Hardhead_7 writes "Our recent discussion about how much your degree is worth got me thinking. I've been working in the IT field for several years now, but I don't have anything to my name other than an A+ certificate and vendor specific training (e.g., Dell certified). Now I'm looking to move up in the IT field, and I want some stuff on my resume to demonstrate to future employers that I know what I'm doing, enough that I can get in the door for an interview. So my question to Slashdot is this: What certifications are the most valuable and sought-after? What will impress potential employers and be most likely to help land a decent job for someone who doesn't have a degree, but knows how to troubleshoot and can do a bit of programming if needed?"
Probably depends a lot on where you are.
Around here, certifications mean very little. Employers are generally more concerned about the kind of work you've done at previous jobs. A few good references who will tell people how awesome you are and an impressive list of "my duties included" does you more good than a sheet full of "ABC+ Pro Certified" here.
That said, I've talked to friends elsewhere that have related the exact opposite.
I'd say ask around your local area. No point in getting a plate full of certifications if they mean nothing to the employers in your area.
Experience does. Build something, or contribute to an Open Source project.
Get a CCNA if you want to make money. MCSE is a total joke nowadays.
My girlfriend is Double D cert' and I just pay her to sit at home.
She doesn't even have a college education, I would be amazed if she even has a GED.
Soon as I find out where she got the DD's I'll let you know.
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Cert what you know. Whatever you do, get a cert in it. Don't be afraid to get a "vendor specific" cert. After all, CCIE is nothing more than just a vendor specific cert. Since you don't have a degree, having some certs to throw around help people believe in your abilities, even if the cert doesn't do anything other than reflect knowledge and skills you already have.
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Some people look for experience and hands-on expertise and HR people look for words in a search list. I don't think I have ever been hired easily by going through HR filters but begged to work for companies who know what my resume actually means. Techs know other techs. And, frankly, I am equally skeptical of people who go out chasing every certification they can until their resume looks like a NASCAR racer.
Actually, my wide range of experience leads people to ask me the same question(s) asked of people with a multitude of certs: "do you REALLY know all that stuff?" My answer is "I've been doing this a very long time and I don't put anything down there I can't prove. There's still LOTS I don't know, but I doubt there's much I can't pick up in a very short time." And that's the reality of it. Can you do it all? Is it "easy" for you? If it's not easy for you, then specialize and at least get really good in your speciality. But don't just go getting some labels if it's not in your nature to actually be able to do what you claim -- if you're not truly inclined in that area, you're not just disappointing your employer, you're harming the whole of IT out here by lowering everyone's expectations.
Heh... someone above says "degree... seriously... degree!" Really? If you want to get into management, yes... get a degree... a BUSINESS DEGREE. Getting a degree in computer science or programming is... uh... a huge waste of time and money. I have been through some of that and I know what people come out of those mills. They can teach and test a lot of things, but they never seem to be able to insert that "spark" every good programmer has. That spark comes from somewhere else. And if we are talking about a degree in anything else computer and networking related? Take courses in various technologies, not a whole degree. Degrees in IT are useless.
HR expects a Bachelor's degree even for the office help, admin assistant, secretary, etc. It's the new high school diploma, since high school diplomas have been rendered useless by local control and selfishness. (a town has an incentive to pass every student in the local school system)
His only hope is to avoid HR.
The issue with certifications from IT companies is that there are very few standards which regulate them. Essentially, all they mean is that you turned up and probably passed a test. If you have not used this knowledge since then the certificate is as good a useless. If you have that degree from a reputable school then that already speaks to your ability. Now you have to be convincing of the specific skills.
Generalizations are impossible. There are so many areas of IT which require skills that you will never acquire in a classroom that the only way to see if a candidate is worth their salt is an interview. Here we come to your point of actually reaching the interview stage. The US is a country which largely works on a "who you know" basis. Networking is very important here. This differs in other countries. As someone who regularly reviews resumes for candidates I am shocked by the poor quality of the literacy in the resume and also the incorrect use of technical names, abbreviations and acronyms (and people who have no idea what this last word actually means). You can judge a great deal about the candidate from their resume. Do not try to use terms with which you are not 100% familiar. It is incredible the number of resumes from candidates who will incorrectly use terms because they are not proficient and try to over fill the skill section.
Hopefully, if you are looking to move to an organization worth moving to, they will have good staff at the interview. If the position is looking for a particular proficiency and you don't have it then of course you are at a disadvantage. But an employer will consider paying less for someone who is bright, hard working and thinks the right way.
Specific skill sets can be easily acquired in most circumstances. General skills can take a lifetime to acquire.
Have your resume edited by someone else. Please. Then find someone who can deliver it to the right person. This is your best chance of getting an interview.
If you're a programmer, programming language certifications mean very little. After all, you're a programmer. IF however, you don't always want to be a programmer and want to find a way to parlay yourself into a more management related position then something like a Project Management certification (PMP) could do quiet well. Other certs that show a certain level of expertise or specialty can be effective too, but only if you're trying to branch out. Getting certified in something like Backtrack for security and penetration testing can go a long way towards making you a more well rounded option.
Likewise, if you've worked your way into programming but don't have a degree, the certifications can go a long way towards adding credibility when resumes are being sifted through.
If you get certifications for something you already do or should very naturally pick up in your normal course of employment though, it's not going to stand out that much. If you've been a java programmer for 10 years and have every java certification under the Sun (see what I did there?) it's not going to be much different on paper than just saying you've been a java programmer for 10 years. You have 10 years of java programming experience and Backtrack or PMP certification though...all of a sudden you stand out a little more.
Similarly, if you have spent most of your career as a Python programmer and then got certified for Perl, Ruby, and PHP...not that big of a deal. You get a major Java or .NET certification though...that's fairly different environment and the certification goes a long way towards validating your ability in that area especially if you haven't previously had a job yet to back it up. It's help to transition from one to another because, unless somebody is desperate to hire "a programmer" if you don't have the job experience with the language you telling them how quickly "you can pick it up" isn't going to do you any good.
Nobody wants to pay you while you learn to do what they hired you to do, only to see you start demanding raises as soon as you get good at it (not that that ever happens...just sayin).
"Don't teach a man to fish, feed yourself. He's a grown man. Fishing's not that hard." - Ron Swanson
It's far more impressive to be the guy that certifies people than the guy who gets a cert.
And that way you can give yourself all the coolest sounding ones.
And if you can convince a few people to buy your cert, it'll not only make you money, but give your certification body even more prestige; because everyone who buys your cert will be hyping it as "really valuable" on /., etc.
The question stands: If a cert or a degree doesn't matter for who you hire, how do you filter your resumes to know who to interview? That's where both work. They don't get you a job, they get you an interview.
Last time we were hiring for a programmer (large international company), we had so few applicants that it simply wasn't worth it for HR to "filter" them in any way before handing them on to me. I set up interviews for each applicant and then asked them a bunch of questions. At no point did their certifications come in to question.
And no, I didn't ask the typical "university knowledge" questions such as "which of these is likely to be the best sorting method for this set of data?" and other such bollocks; instead my questions were things more relevant to real world programming like, "Right, you've just written some really cruddy code as a proof-of-concept and Marketing want to start selling it next week as a real product, what do we do?" and "How long do you think it'd take you to clone the Windows Calculator in a language and environment of your choice?".
To note, when we hire a programmer, we don't just look for drones that can churn out code exactly to a perfectly written spec written by someone that probably could've done the code themselves; instead we look for someone that can interpret badly written fuzzy marketing speak and then use creativity and imagination to meet what Marketing have asked for in the most elegant, flexible and maintainable way. So far, my little team is doing a great job and I'm pretty proud of them.
Final side note: Yes, I say "my team" and I am indeed in charge there, but I'm a developer myself - not a manager... we have a manager (that sits in another office several hundred KM away) to look after paperwork, budgets and so on - I just look after "who's doing what" and passing the paperwork over to the manager (who tends to just approve anything I send his way, which I'm also very thankful for).
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What kind of job do you want?
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
You are filtering out good people.
I put them on my resume. Mainly because it wont hurt and it keeps HR and the headhunters happy. Does that mean I am a jackass that doesn't know anything because I got them, regardless if I owned my own I.T. business as a contractor? That is like saying you do not need a computer science degree to write simple scripting code, therefore every Unix admin who has a CS degree must somehow be incompetent.
Most competent I.T. folks put them on their resume. If they do not then I assume they do not love their job or their previously employer did not give them the tools they needed to succeed. I view it as incompetence. Not because they need that MCSE or CISCO cert but because they agreed that it was not needed and ok to be under certified or the candidate refuses to better themselves.
You can learn a lot with certain certifications that you never know about. Windows 2008 for example has many new features that I had no clue about, explained by a MCSE trainer. It can help if you are already competent.
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So can we discount college degrees too? Sure you do not learn real world experience, but you do learn the theory and basics about a profession and it shows dedication to the employer.
MCSE' tests are hard and those who say they are easy never took them. They are adaptive, which means as soon as you make a wrong answer it keeps asking you things related to the last question. I am not saying you can walk right in and work. But, if you passed all the MCSE and CISCO exams you can tell the new employee you need x.y, and z done and they will probably know what you are talking about and can use some tools to do the job. Maybe not perfect, but enough to start an entry level career.
The question is where do you start? YOu need experience somewhere and volunteering at GeekSquad looks pretty embarasing on a resume.
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H1-B, cos US grads no engineers, anymore.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Sorry if that's bad news. A degree is the most respected qualification out there. When I was going through uni, I scoffed at the mundane nature of the material they were teaching me. Joked about how I could get better value using it as toilet paper. 10 years later, it hit me like a brick. I was building 3rd normal form databases. Referential Integrity was a term I understood. I could build components with Lazy Evaluation, and I knew why I was doing it.
Getting a degree also tells prospective employers that you're a finisher. You don't just start stuff and bail when it gets scary. You don't give up on a project because parts of it are hard or unpleasant. I know some employers who don't care what degree you've got, as long as you've got one.
If you want an employer's respect, there is no quick and easy way to win it. You have to do the really hard stuff to prove that you can do the really hard stuff.
Good luck.
That is the problem. Most shops have a hiring process that cares more about the pieces of paper, forcing candidates to slap the CCIE, CNE, CCIE, BOFH, BDSM, TL;DR stuff after their names. For a HR rep, they wouldn't even stop to cross check the cert IDs they have. It just means the resume stays on the desk and actually makes it to the tech people.
Here is the Scylla and Charybdis of job hunting: The clued people will see the certs and toss the resume as someone who doesn't have experience other than taking tests. However, to get to the clued people, in most companies, one has to pass the HR droids. They ogle at the alphabet soup of letters, and go "ooo, here is our candidate", passing the resume on, while experienced candidates they look at the resume, go "well, he did run this, this, and this... but he doesn't have any paperwork, so he really hasn't maintained his career. Better off with someone with pieces of paper."
Of course, the best way to bypass that BS is to have contacts, so the hiring process consists of "Well, you got me home after I was passed out in the bushes after that party, so you are hired."
You mean, be part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Reason is I think many tech types misunderstand who and what certifications are for. They aren't for you, or your peers. I don't go showing off my certs, I don't sign my e-mails with them, or that kind of shit. They are for the managers that hire people.
While it is popular, particularly among Linux people, to hate on the MCSE, in my experience many jobs want one, and some require it. Managers like it, that is what it is for.
So that you think it is a joke may not be all that relevant.
Also I fail to see how it would be a joke and a CCNA would not. The CCNA is not a difficult cert to get. Hardest thing I had on the test was that the router simulation they use is Boson NetSim and it doesn't implement all the commands of real IOS (and I should add I still passed easily on the first try).
If you want to get a cert for yourself, just as a guided learning experience, then get whatever interests you. Hell you don't even have to take the test, you can just study the materials and learn it if you like.
However if you are getting a cert for professional advancement or to get a job, the consideration then is what management likes, in particular the management in the area you are interested in. It doesn't matter how much of a "joke" it is. The idea isn't to advance your skills, it is to have something to help your career.
What that is could change over time too. For example I have my A+. I doubt anyone would care anymore, I've been doing IT for about 12 years now and do higher level stuff. However when I got it, in 1999, I was looking to be able to get lower level tech type jobs and it mattered. In particular, going for student computer support jobs on campus, it put me ahead of most students that had no certification. It was worth getting.
These days were I to get something, I would actually probably look at the MCITP, the MCSE replacement, since Windows support is a major part of what I do. I wouldn't get it because I think it would help me be better at my job, I'd get it because it would make managers more likely to hire me for that sort of job.
It's the same reason I refuse to hire anyone who graduated highschool; in fact I usually prefer people who misspell half their CV, it shows they haven't wasted their time on useless things like educating themselves and have instead focused on what's important: Experience!
What "best" means for certification would depend on your objectives, I suppose.
Here's a nonobvious alternative: get yourself certified as "not mentally competent". This may not be as difficult as you think, although canceling the certification later could be quite a challenge...
If you're certified incompetent in a civilized country, a bureaucrat will be appointed to look after your finances (at no charge to you), ensure you get every bit of welfare you might be entitled to, and defend you at public expense against fraud or serious rip-off attempts. You can still work, if you want, without greatly reducing your welfare entitlement (amazing what a certificate can do). However, you now have a license to kill/maim/etc. without fear of punishment since you are not responsible for your actions. Some places don't even remove passports or driving licenses from such people.
Frighteningly, I knew one such person in Canada. A sociopathic, psychopathic, manic-depressive, evil genius, and unrestrained by the legal impediments which would limit a sane person's actions. Acts of violence repeatedly went unpunished by the criminal system, and attempts for redress were rejected by the civil courts. The legal system was trumped by the certificate of incompetence.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Once upon a time, universities were for the top 5-10%.
Now, in the UK, university is for about 50% of people, not really determined by entrance qualifications since these have been corrupted by all the exam boards being sold to the publishers.
The UK is full of people with meaningless pieces of paper. Of course you're going to get lots of people who look qualified on paper.
It's worse than that. The 'everyone must go to university' mentality from government (starting with the Conservatives, exacerbated by Labour) has meant that a lot of really great vocational institutions became third-rate universities. Now, instead of offering world-class vocational qualifications, they offer worthless academic ones. And I'm not just talking about things like plumbing: one of the best aerospace engineering courses in the world used to be a heavily practical course at a polytechnic, which has since become a 'university' and now produces graduates no better than any other second or third tier university. The curriculum has changed to be more in line with an academic course, and it's lost all of the things that made it good in the first place (at least, according to people I know trying to hire engineers to design aircraft).
There's nothing wrong with 50% of the population going in to higher education, the problem is that a large chunk of them are in make-work degree schemes, where they are taught nothing of any value to them.
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Get experience and a basic degree BS is good enough and can be in anything. Certs only mean you were a sucker and paid the time and money to get the worthless things.
the ONLY jobs that certs mean anything is entry level. You are not looking to "move up" to another entry level position are you?
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Everything you say is true, but I still can't quite work out who stood to benefit from it. Why did Thatcher rename all the polys? Why was NL obsessed with increasing numbers of people in "university" rather than, as you suggest, increasing skilled labour in general?
I see that it is possible to create lots of pointless degrees, pay per head, and make lots of departments happy with high in-take for programmes which comprise little useful work. But that only works after the whole system has been established. Who planned it out in the first place, and why? It is often said that it was one way of massaging unemployment figures through the '80s, like telling men in their 50s who were able to work to sign up for Invalidity Benefit. But there are so many ways of misleading the population on unemployment and it is not like hearing a number on TV is going to change the average person's voting behaviour, so I am not satisfied with that answer.
Put more bluntly: which group stood to gain financially by the decision? I could see an argument that the intention was to create a country which lacks essential skills as an excuse to both shipping entire industries abroad and opening borders, reducing labour costs. Even if you want to keep people in something to stop a Madrid where suddenly everyone sees that there really isn't a need for so many young workers at home, why would you keep them doing something which is so clearly pointless? Why not exportable skills at the very least? Would the UK not benefit from skilled emigrants sending money back home?
There's this nagging conspiracist in my head which says that recent governments have wanted the UK to fail: they're represented by increasingly mediocre individuals who are aware of how tenuous their position is and who feel threatened by their own countrymen. Thatcher was no conservative and Blair no laborista; they may each have made some short-term contributions to the country coincident with ostensible ideals but for the long term they engaged in very similar destructive behaviour.
You've got to be kidding. Do you know how many lawyers are unemployed because they think their degree guarantees them a job? No, to be a lawyer nowadays means to start your own firm -- not cheap.
Better to go to med school. Guaranteed jobs, albeit lots of up-front work. Besides, med school includes a lot of memorization -- something more in line with most IT certs than law school tests.
Seems to me, the trick is to get experience in a field, then become a lawyer specializing in that field. Because one knows the material, one is more valuable to a firm.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.