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?"

Comments

Vodka!

[Anrego]

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.

Re:Vodka!

[Opportunist]

ISO9k, ISO20k, ISO27k... hell, anything with ISO in front of it will be a foot in the door to a career.

Realize, though, that you will not be productive anymore. You will spend your time designing processes, forcing it down the throat of the affected departments against the best resistance they can muster and spending the rest of the time finding out how they managed to circumvent and ignore them. Especially for the 27k flavor.

If you do not like meetings, if you do not like playing bullshit bingo, if you do not enjoy being "that asshole that makes everything complicated", do not apply.

Re:Vodka!

[Opportunist]

There are good process managers and bad ones. The good ones will probably increase your overhead, much like the bad ones, but not unnecessarily so. For example, the much-dreaded pressure to write documentation and (the cheek!) even requiring its review as a major process point. Yes, that increases the time necessary to complete the job. But it keeps the product serviceable after 3 years when every programmer who wrote it left and nobody really knows anything about the inner workings anymore.

Likewise, requiring a strict distinction between production, test and live system increases overhead. But it also increases stability and manageability of the whole mess, especially in huge projects with different departments adding to them.

The examples are numerous and I am sure everyone who ever wrote code in an environment consisting of more than a handful developers and users will know a few more cases where suddenly some process dork butted in and you wondered who died and made the idiot king.

The key difference between a good and a bad process manager is that the good one will notice that "one size fits all" does not apply for processes. There is not one development process. There are several, depending on the size of the project, the departments involved, the security requirements, the external requirements, not to mention compliance and legal problems. Using one process for all of them necessitates to use the all-encompassing full blown pearly king process with all bells and whistles attached, which is absolute overkill for probably 90% of the projects a company might have. Good processes are modular and can be assembled from process building blocks that fit neatly into each other to ensure that every project has every base covered, and nothing else.

This does of course also require top notch project managers who know how to decide which project process to use for what project. Again, a good process manager will give him the tools to determine which one is to be used.

Sadly, usually the process manager is someone in the company who has actually other things to do than to design processes, it's usually something some poor idiot gets tossed into on top of his actual work (because the company doesn't really want to get working, reliable processes but just needs some certificate that depends on having such processes). This is a nightmare. Because the processes will have little, if any, semblance of reality, people will learn them by heart for the audit then forget them immediately, because they are simply not workable.

I am fairly convinced that you're subject to such processes.

It is quite possible to create good processes that do actually help you instead of hindering you, that ensure that you get good specs, that ensure that you get resources timely and sufficiently, that ensure that production doesn't suddenly grind to a halt because someone "forgot" to do something (and guess who gets to work crunch overtime to make it up). They can actually make life a lot easier, if done right.

Or a lot harder, if not.

Certifications don't impress...

[mikeroySoft]

Experience does. Build something, or contribute to an Open Source project.

Re:Certifications don't impress...

[Anonymous Coward]

Certifications don't impress, however they do get you past the HR filter so you get to speak to someone to whom your experience is relevant. No Certs, no interview, no chance to shine.

Re:Certifications don't impress...

[Surt]

You're looking at a software engineer job there, not an IT job (e.g. Network admin).
Certs are useless if you're an engineer, but useful if you're in IT.

Re:Certifications don't impress...

[mwvdlee]

That spells STAR, not SMART.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situation,_Task,_Action,_Result
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMART_criteria

Re:Certifications don't impress...

[TheMCP]

I am a senior software engineer with 23 years of professional experience. I've built web sites and web applications for Fortune 500 companies and major nonprofits and for the air force and joint chiefs of staff, and my past clients included all but one of the top 50 largest financial institutions in the country.

When I'm looking for work, the #1 thing that generates the most calls about my resume (by a long shot) is the one product certification I have, which is (and all of this is indicated plainly on my resume) something like six major versions behind on the software I was certified in, was 11 years ago, and I've never done a complete installation of the product. Even knowing that fact, people are desperate to get me to do work for that product because I was certified in it and hardly anyone is.

So, while smart companies look for experience and a track record of successful projects, it remains true that if you get the *right* certification, it will still get you more work anyway.

Double D Certified

[Rivalz]

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.

Depends on who is hiring

[erroneus]

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.

Re:Depends on who is hiring

[wrook]

A bit off topic, but you triggered something I've been thinking about for a couple of years. That "spark" is fluency.

I swtiched jobs from being a computer programmer to being an ESL teacher in Japan. Japan is somewhat famous for churning out students who know a lot *about* English, but can't order a drink at Mac Donald's. We used to have a name for those kinds of people with regard to programming languages: language laywers. They can answer any question you put to them *about* a programming language, but couldn't program to save their life. These people often make it past job interviews easily, but then turn out to be huge disappointments when they actually get down to work. I've read a lot about this problem, but the more I look at it, the more I realise that these disabled programmers are just like my students. They have a vocabulary of 5000 words, know every grammar rule in the book but just can't speak.

My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing. The vast majority of programming is not conceptually difficult (contrary to what a lot of people would have you believe). We only make it difficult because we suck at writing. The vast majority of programmers aren't fluent, and don't even have a desire to be fluent. They don't read other people's code. They don't recognise or use idioms. They don't think *in the programming language*. Most code sucks because we have the fluency equivalent of 3 year olds trying to write a novel. And so our programs are needlessly complex.

Those programmers with a "spark" are programmers who have an innate talent for the language. Or they are people who have read and read and read code. Or both. We teach programming wrong. We teach it the way Japanese teachers have been teaching English. We teach about programming and expect that students will spontaneously learn to write from this collection of facts.

In language acquisition there is a hypothesis called the "Input Hypothesis". It states that *all* language acquisition comes from "comprehensible input". That is, if you hear or read language that you can understand based on what you already know and from context, you will acquire it. Explanation does not help you acquire language. I believe the same is true of programming. We should be immersing students in good code. We should be burying them in idiom after idiom after idiom, allowing them to acquire the ability to program without explanation.

HR filter: he's sunk

[r00t]

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.

Certificate qualifications can be worth anything

[TooTechy]

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.

Start your own cert organization.

[ron_ivi]

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.

Re:Start your own cert organization.

[hendersj]

The parent here is perhaps meant to be funny, but there is a nugget of truth in what he says.

Actually creating a certification takes a lot of work - I spent the past 5 years working as part of the team that worked on IT certification programs and exams at Novell. But to understand what certifications hold value in the industry, it does help to understand the process by which a program is created, because if a program isn't built around sound principles, then the certification will be worthless as anything other than a wall decoration.

First, you have to certify based on something people actually do. Certifications that have real value start with a job task analysis (JTA) and the program is built around what people actually do for a living. It doesn't do you any good to certify based on criteria that don't map to a specific job function.

Second, the testing methodology needs to be sound. People laugh about paper certifications, but paper certs are a real problem in the industry. This can happen because a question pool is leaked and a 'braindump' is created. Dealing with braindump sites is like playing whack-a-mole. So the testing methodology should resist braindumps, either through adaptive testing or through the use of performance based testing (sometimes called 'practical testing' or some variation of that). Practical testing tends to be more resistant to braindumps because that type of resource gives you the answer - but in a practical exam, you have to demonstrate the application of the answer. So if the braindump tells you "do x, y, and z", those are the steps you need to do to complete the tasks.

If a certification is ISO 17024 compliant, then it has increased value as well. That ISO standard specifies a number of things (which are adopted by other organisations, like ANSI) about how a certification is built. Vendor-specific certifications tend to not be ISO 17024 compliant (there are a few exceptions) sometimes because of cost or resource requirements. As I understand it, there are pieces of the standard that specify, for example, that the people who create the exam and the people who create the course materials cannot talk with each other about the content. The JTA information can (I think, it might be required or recommended) be shared between the two groups, but they must derive their own information from the pool of information about the topic. The purpose for this is that it's the knowledge that's needed, rather than the specific course materials created by the certifying body. In some cases, the certifying body just publishes the objectives and leaves it to others to create the courses around those objectives.

I'm also of the opinion that the value is higher if rather than relying on recall for answers, the exam requires cognitive skills. Exams like this tend to be much more labor intensive to create and evaluate properly to ensure they're fair, but that value is significant as well because then the certification shows that the candidate knows more than just the answer to the questions on the exam, but how to apply their knowledge in a useful way. Performance-based tests are really the best way to do this in my opinion.

The exams also must have gone through some form of psychometric analysis in order to be legally defensible. If a program uses multiple exam forms (which is generally the case), then the psychometric analysis is used to ensure the forms are fairly balanced and if a candidate can pass the exam on form 1, that they would most likely pass it on the other forms as well.

Thirdly, a properly built certification program is going to have continuing certification requirements. Some organizations (like CompTIA) used to certify "once and forever", but certifications like that really don't have that much value over the long term. I hold an LPIC-1 certification that I got in 2003, but that doesn't really tell anyone what I know about modern Linux distributions.

Certifications are helpful if you're going through the 'front door' trying t

Re:who certifies the certifiers?

[YttriumOxide]

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).

Uh, first things first

[deblau]

What kind of job do you want?

Re:Hide them! Admit nothing!

[Billly Gates]

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.

Re:J. D. *

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

H1-B, cos US grads no engineers, anymore.

Get a degree

[Wolfling1]

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.

Re:J. D. *

[Wyatt Earp]

You mean, be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Do you say that as a tech or manager?

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Hide them! Admit nothing!

[Spad]

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!

Certified incompetent...

[AliasMarlowe]

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.