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Are Certifications Worth the Time and Money?
Nerval's Lobster writes: Having one or more certifications sounds pretty sensible in today's world, doesn't it? Many jobs demand proof that you've mastered a particular technology. But is the argument for spending lots of time and money to earn a certification as ironclad as it seems? In a new column, developer David Bolton argues 'no.' Most certifications just prove you can pass tests, he argues, not mastery of a particular language or platform; and given the speed at which technology evolves, most are at risk of becoming quickly outdated. Plus they aren't the sole determiner of whether you can actually land a job: 'Recruiters sometimes have trouble determining a developer's degree of technical experience, and so insist upon certificates or tests to judge abilities. If you manage to get past them to the job interview, the interviewer (provided they're also a developer) can usually get a good feel for your actual programming ability and whether you'll fit well with the group.' Are certifications mostly a rip-off, or are some (especially the advanced ones) actually useful, as many people insist?
I would never ever hire a programmer because of their certifications. I hire because of expertise, period. Certifications are a rip-off.
no, I don't have a sig
You are always selling yourself, your plans, and your ideas, no matter what business environment you are in - self-employed or corporate. Certifications can be a tool for that - and even a vital tool if you're dealing with HR drones that don't understand anything else.
That being said, I have no formal certs and have done extremely well for myself - but I also have very good sales skills. It's the one thing I encourage to everyone that asks me for career advice - learn to sell. It doesn't matter what you do in life, but you will always be selling something (assuming your work is of any sort of significance).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I'd only trust a certified certifications expert to answer that question.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
your H-1B certificate is all you really need.
I have a couple listed on my resume. I'm sure it helped get my foot in the door past the recruiting / HR shrews to get to an actual interview.
Was it worth the cost? Hard to say in the long run, but I think in the beginning it helped just a tiny bit to stand out from competition. They weren't all that costly to begin with, but at that time in my life, sure seemed like it.
As for further certs, push for the employer to pay for you getting them. Plenty of certs I never bothered to get, but studied for anyway just to stay ahead of the curve and keep my skills sharp.
they're your admission "ticket" to get the interview.
As compared to experience DOING the things you are certified to do, I'd say no.
As compared to a college degree, maybe, maybe not. I think it depends on the degree, the certification, and the job(s) you're going for.
As compared to no experience, and no degree, I'd say yes.
For sysadmin / devops / network admin / desktop support and maybe a little into the infosec side, certs are probably a good idea.
For programmers (etc), certs really don't make any sense.
Like making copywriters hit the obstacle course for time before hiring them.
I'll still look at a candidate, but I generally assume the person is covering incompetency in skill with a paid for affirmation.
Having gone through the hiring process a couple of times in the last couple of years, HR and recruiters are the biggest hinderance to companies hiring talented individuals. For a tech position, HR has become a gatekeeper to the hiring manager. Unfortunately they have no knowledge of the position or the technologies.
Certificates get you past this gatekeeper. They are fairly useless otherwise, but since HR has wedged themselves between the candidate and the hiring manager, they become a bit of a necessary evil.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
If you want a job anywhere near project management, you need the PMP certification. Do a job search for "project management" and check the first ten results. Every one of them will say PMP required or preferred.
No. Now fuck off Dice.
Yes if you learn from them, absolutely.
Yes if you are in IT
Yes if you are a programmer, and choose a cert carefully (J2EE Architect, and you want to do that kind of thing).
Yes if you can spend a weekend in the library and pass the test with no problem, and someone wants you to have it
Yes if your employer will pay for it, and you can study at work
No if you are a programmer (with some exceptions, see above).
No if you don't understand the subject, even after getting the cert
No if you take months and months to get the cert, and still don't understand it
No if you can spend the time better working on an open source project
No if you don't learn anything from it.
This might be the most-asked question on Slashdot.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
...than a dice "insights" spam.
Having conducted probably 500 software developer interviews, I can tell you that seeing Certificates listed on a candidate's Resume is typically a red flag that indicates they will not be a good candidate. It doesn't mean they will absolutely be bad, just an indication that they probably aren't right for the sorts of positions I hire for. Kind of like seeing "Microsoft Office" listed prominently under their "Skills" section.
If you are an engeener in service providing company your certification level is essential for HR of this company. Be it Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Citrix, VMware or whatever - the company providing services (like implementation) usually needs to have certified employers to reach certain partner level (like Gold, Platinium and what-the-fuck-they-had-invented-recently). It is just a business for these companies to sell certifications for their products.
Is it important to have certifications? Well just look at the policies FOR EMPLOYERS that the vendors in your area of interest are providing.
The higher your level of experience and completed education, the less useful certifications become.
If you're just starting out, a certification is useful, especially if it's in an area you have no formal or only limited experience in.
If you have extensive experience and/or advanced completed education (BSc, MSc, PhD) then I wouldn't recommend it.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They're worse than useless.
People with dozens of certifications on their resume actually look bad. Why? They are meaningless and without substance. They show that a person is more a politician/marketing person than an actual worker. Few things are more annoying than people who don't do any real work but play politics and suck up to non-technical managers - and that is _exactly_ the kind of attitude which having too many certifications signals.
I'm a PE in electrical engineering and I've been out of work since December 2013.
You tell me if it was worth the time and money.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If you need someone to babysit you through reading a few overheads and taking a trivial "exam" each day, then yes, certificates are worth the investment.
But if you need that kind of hand holding to learn something, you're not worth hiring. I always shuffled certificate-braggers to the *bottom* of the resume pile as a result.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Early in your career, yes.
8-10 years in, your experience should be your certification.
(do well and try to move to different projects for a wide variety of experience, do interesting side projects or contribute to open source)
BlameBillCosby.com
2 resumes, both have equal work time in IT, one has several certs one doesn't.
Which would you hire?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
This is a tough question, and maybe that's why it's being posted on Slashdot. As someone struggling to find a job in the tech sector, who also has no degrees nor certifications, I've seen the whole "cert" thing as a double edged sword. First and foremost, it seems like every vendor in the known universe now offers a certification for their product. Now, who's getting a cut of the money that goes into testing and certifying people for product X? The vendor. That's who. I've gotten the impression that it's just a ploy on behalf of the vendors to make a quick buck. However, with that being said, you can look at the positives like this: Bob is certified in Product X. Company C uses Product X. To HR common folk, the fact that Bob is certified by the vendor in Product X makes him instantly more qualified than me, who lacks any kind of certification whatsoever. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. Maybe I know the product much better than Bob, but never hunkered down the $1100 to take the exam and get certified. Maybe I've never used the program before, and Bob really is the better man for the job. Maybe Bob spent a few all nighters cramming for an exam in which he regurgitated his text book back onto the bubble-in form during the test (think standardized testing). It's entirely situational though. To be fair, a lot of certification exams these days also include a hands-on portion which may require you to actually think. And to avoid making any more sweeping generalizations, some certifications are much harder to obtain than others. My biggest prohibiting factor in becoming certified in anything is the cost, followed by whether or not I'll actually net any kind of immediate benefit from becoming certified in anything. That, coupled with the fact that you need to re-certify every few years, and the constant changing landscape of the tech world (here today, gone tomorrow), makes me really question the relevance and long term benefits of a certification. Now a CS degree... that's a different story. Or is it?
In the Netherlands, I didn't really need certification. Now in Chile, it's a must.
"I'm not much interested in interoperability. I want substitutability. I want to be able to throw your software out."
Getting a college degree, you actually learn something.
I've run into more than a few people who have made it through college quite uncontaminated by knowledge.
...on the job. A colleague of mine with 30+ years of experience was recently turned down for a job because he didn't have a 4-year University certification. Many of the Program Management jobs I've seen require a PMP certification. Same with some IT jobs who want a CCNE or something along those lines.
Certifications are like grade points. They are precisely as important as the interviewer thinks they are. And that's it.
2 resumes, both have equal work time in IT, one has several certs one doesn't.
Which would you hire?
The one that interviews better most likely.
... Google-fu and recognizing the right info is way more important than memorizing it. Find a way to certify that skill and we might be talking.
If power or the net goes out, I can't work on anything anyway. Code and databases rock, but they don't run on papyrus.
I like certification exams for my annual review with my current job. In January I will commit to obtaining/upgrading a certification. It is then recorded on my development plan. Then after completing the certification it is documented and my manager is happy. I completed my goal and showed some initiative towards expanding my technical skills. It is all documented in black in white with my certificate.
I actually give -2 for certification. That's right, certification will, in my book, nullify the positive impact of an engineering degree *and* one relevant job. Why? Because it is, more often than not, a means of hiding shortcomings behind the veneer of something that seems official.
That's a load of crap. I have a graduate degrees in both business and engineering plus I hold an accounting certification. You would discount my entire education because I hold an accounting certification? NOBODY would even interview me for an accounting job if I didn't have that certification.
Certificates are sometimes a helpful way to signal that the person has some talent. Taking the accounting certification didn't mean I knew more accounting than before the test but it did give me a way to provide evidence to potential clients/employers that I do actually know what I am doing.
I am mostly a startup guy, but I have also worked at Google. Google actually conducted a large survey of all their applicants' resumes and cross-referenced the words they contain with how "successful" those people were at the company (I do not know how they defined that). There were no sure-fire words indicating success. But there was one that predicted the opposite: that's right, "certification."
What works at Google is not necessarily applicable in the rest of the world. Perhaps people with certifications tend not to succeed at Google. That does not mean that they don't succeed elsewhere. It only means they didn't succeed at Google - nothing more. In fact there are many professions where you won't even get considered for an interview without a certification.
The problem with certifications is that brain dumps are a big business.
Alot of folks believe that Certifications will enhance their chances of getting a job.
Hence, they brain dump the exam and pass.
For the folks who actually take the time and learn the material the certification is testing for, and pass the exam honestly, the certification process is a boon.
Unfortunately, we live in an on-demand society, so interviewers often see many more of the former than the latter.
I'm on the interview panel for my team. And I see an awful lot of paper tigers. Given that I also have an alphabet soup of certs, I know the skill levels those exams test for, and I tailor my interview questions to things that they should be able to answer, as well as any other technology they put on their resume. If it's on the resume, the candidate should be able to speak to it
Within 5 questions, I can almost always determine the persons actual skill level and whether or not they dumped the exam. And unfortunately, there are *alot*. To add to that, there are also some recruiters who actually encourage the candidates to add certain keywords to their resumes. I actually got one guy to admit during the interview that he'd just added it, after I started asking questions on it.
We have gotten a few folks with a good amount of certs that actually knew their stuff. We even hired a few of them. The ones we didn't hire, I knew we weren't going to be able to pay them what they'd be looking for, so they turned down the job.
In my opinion though, it's worth it to wade through the dross and take the time to make sure you get the right person. If you're careless in your hiring practices, you'll just be right back on the merry-go-round
if it's some young hr person then certs might well impress. if it's an old fart like myself, practical experience or good answers to selective questions will always out trump a piece of paper.
unless it's the guy you know, friend of the bosses son, whatever. Who you know > *
Do you have a citation for that Google finding? Interested to know more...
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Maybe we should get rid of *all* formal credentials? Get rid of all licenses, and degrees, along with certs.
A drivers license does not prove you know how to drive. A teaching credential does not prove you are a competent teacher. Does a college degree prove you even know how to read?
And so on, right down the line.
Or, maybe a more intelligent way to look at is: a credential is what it is. It prove you know enough about something to pass the test. No test is ever perfect.
Tech credentials leave a lot to be desired. But, from my experience they are far superior to interview test questions. I have had interview tests from interviewers who were dead wrong. I have had interviewers ask questions that were insane. Besides, what if the interviewing does not like you? Maybe the interviewer does not like your race, gender, nationality, or age - in that case you would be sure to fail. At least certs have a certain objectivity.
Sort of. The CCIE just requires you to pass the Written to recertify every 2 years, and it can be any Written, not for the track you passed the Lab exam in.
Passing any Cisco exam recertifies everything at the level it's at and everything below it.
So for example, lets say I have CCNP Routing and Switching, CCNA Routing and Switching, CCNA Security, and..... CCNA Service Provider.
All I need to do in order to recertify all of that is to pass one Professional level exam (maybe I take one exam for CCNP Security), and everything is recertified.
Or, I pass the CCIE Written exam instead. That qualifies me for the Lab Exam, and renews every cert at the Professional and Associate levels.
If I pass the Lab Exam, then I just need to pass a CCIE Written every two years in order to recertify the whole shebang.
So Cisco recert policies don't actually do much to keep you current on the technology you're certified for. What they do is keep you taking Cisco exams so that you can keep listing everything you've earned on your resume. This is incentive to avoid letting things expire, because if you do, then you have to retake everything.
"Badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!"
...omphaloskepsis often...
Looks like someone decided we were overdue for the annual certifications debate. This question will still be popping up ten years from now and they will not be going away any time soon, simply because there is no cut and dry yes or no answer. It all depends on the person, the cert, the situation, and your perspective.
Personally? I still have them and I'm currently studying for others. I'm not even job searching right now; I'm perfectly happy where I'm at. Certifications simply give me a template of what I need to study for the skills I want to learn, and give me goals/benchmarks to aim for. They're like achievements in a game, only more tangible. The vanity of having another cert to post on my Linkedin profile adds more incentive to push myself further. I'm not worried about the material becoming outdated because most of them expire; and if I haven't pushed myself to the next level up by the time they do, it means I'm dragging my ass. I plan on getting CCNP before my CCNA expires, for instance.
The "certs just prove you can pass tests" argument doesn't really apply in my case, because I suck at tests. I suck at academics in general. I barely made it through high school because I am all but incapable of learning things 'theoretically'. So why bother with the certs, you ask? Because I cannot pass an exam unless I actually know the material. Plenty of guys with less than half of my experience could probably finish the exams I am working on in a fraction of the time, but it wouldn't mean as much in their case.
Lastly, certifications do help open doors, especially for those who get stuck in the catch-22 hell that is trying to get experience when everyone expects you to pop out of a cabbage patch with at least 5 years of it under your belt. I'm sure certifications are very easy to disparage from the perspective of someone who is FAR removed from such a scenario with decades of experience and countless connections. I suppose the better discussion would be: How valuable are certifications compared to degrees?
College doesn't prove you know shit. You can put almost anything on resume to "prove" you have experience.
Interview tech questions are even worse than certifications.
SYSADMIN HIRING TRAIL
You enter your candidate search portal with 4 HOURS RESUME REVIEW, 0/12 PHONE SCREENS, and 0/4 IN-PERSON INTERVIEWS.
>HELP
You've got half a day to screen resumes. You're willing to call 12 people to weed out the ones who claim "3 years of VMWare experience" but will read you the wikipedia entry for "virtual memory" when you ask them about their VMWare experience (true story) in order to get down to the three or four you'll bring onsite.
>GET RESUMES
You receive 600 resumes, because the IT worker shortage is a myth as anyone who's spent 6 months between contracts can attest. Fortunately, your company requires all applicants to apply online, so you're saved the recruiter spam out of India and China that you might get otherwise.
You have 600 resumes.
>FILTER KEYWORDS
100 lack any of the previous-position filter keywords (including but not limited to "engineer" "administrator" "systems" "sysadmin" or the always interesting "member of technical staff") Several of those are from people who clearly apply to literally every job posting they can find, regardless of what it's for. Fortunately you don't see those, because they're really depressing to read.
You still have 500 resumes. You have 3 HOURS 45 MINUTES RESUME REVIEW.
>FILTER EXPERIENCE
100 lack necessary years of experience (can substitute a 4-year degree for 2 years of experience) Fortunately, you don't have to personally decide whether a degree from Duke is really only worth 1 year of experience.
You still have 400 resumes. However, your boss just booked over half the time you had blocked out for resume review. You have 1 HOUR 30 MINUTES RESUME REVIEW.
>FILTER FEMALES
2 of them are women. You have 2/12 CANDIDATES
You still have 398 resumes. You have 1 HOUR 15 MINUTES RESUME REVIEW.
>FILTER LOSERS
100 are currently unemployed. There's probably a reason. Sorry, guys. Fortunately, you're not one of them.
You still have 298 resumes. You have 1 HOUR RESUME REVIEW.
>FILTER CERTS
100 have "MCSE" "RHCE" or "VCP". Fortunately, 30 have two or more of those. You get 6 or 7 decent possibilities out of that stack, and start skimming the other 70 to fill out your call list.
You have 11/12 CANDIDATES.
You have no resumes left. You have 15 MINUTES RESUME REVIEW. Your boss wants to discuss TPS reports in 15 minutes, and you don't have time to check out too many people who apparently can't pass simple tests on things they claim to be experts on.
Search the slush pile (Y/N)?
> Y
As it turns out, 20 of the remaining 198 wrote cover letters that linked to their explanation in this thread as to why certs are useless. Unfortunately, you didn't read them, which is just as well considering they're egotistical idiots on the wrong slope of the Dunning-Kruger effect. You pull one out at random and disgustedly toss it when you see a background in desktop support, with a misapplied "Systems Administrator" title. Your boss is standing in your door with "that look" on her face.
YOU'VE REACHED PHONE SCREEN CANYON WITH 11/12 CANDIDATES. Resupply (Y/N)?
>
Most certs do indeed prove only that you can answer multiple choice questions. However, there are certs that truly matter, but not from skills perspective (although that helps).
CCIE is a good example, since it requires the lab part (I know some folks actually try to do the lab part by rota, with several attempts, but it's still rare). Some others might be the architect-level certs from Microsoft or Oracle. CISSP is a bit in the gray area, it's not a vendor-specific cert, but many customers actually appreciate it.
Anyway, while the highest certs may "prove" something about your skills, the biggest benefit is actually in something completely different. If working for a vendor partner (Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, whatever), they typically give you status levels based on the number of cert-holders in the company. So basically, if you have a good enough cert, you can waltz in and say "even if I come here to watch porn every day, you can still pay me and save money". What it really means that even if you are a slob who has just gotten the cert by rota, the company can afford to pay you due to the vendor discounts. If you actually know what you are doing, even better.
I mentioned the CISSP, it's an example of a cert where having you on the payroll does not mean discounts from vendors - but it might give the company a possibility to enter higher-paying projects. Many RFQs usually hand out points based on what certs the people involved actually have.
Yes, but only for the people selling them, especially if you have to pay for a yearly renewall.
I've got more than twenty years of experience in my field. I am an independent consultant and I have more work than I can handle - including working directly for manufacturers doing professional services for their customers.
It's simply amazing to me that you wouldn't even interview me because I have technical certifications.
On the other hand there's no shortage of managers that shoot themselves in the foot all the time so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised after all.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Get certs... they're not time consuming.
Oh, wait... You actually study for those? Most people don't. There's braindumps for that.
Any company who tries to judge my skill by my certs will turn me off the very instant I notice the behavior. Certs are there to get your company partner status. Nothing more.
It may be different in the states, but in my country, there aren't even many companies large enough to warrant even using the technology some of these cert tests are asking about. So that leaves you learning from the books... which are huge. On top of that, in the course they will always tell you about certain functions and that on the test you should answer wrongly, because that's what the manufacturer wants to hear.
Also, in my case I am the storage and virtualization guy. That means I oversee installation, maintenance and troubleshooting of four different SAN environments of two different vendors, at times three different hypervisors with multiple clusters and all the surrounding systems AND thus far two different backup solutions.
Do you think I have the time to study for a silly cert exam? Perhaps my attitude sucks, quite possibly, but I have yet to find an employer loyal enough to me to warrant doing these things in my free time. I am an above average employee as it is.
Also, when you get offered free Q&A sheets along your exam so you'll definitely pass, you know the system's rigged.
In my experience the big three are ones that demonstrate that you not only "know your stuff", but can actually apply it - and they are well thought of in the relevant areas of industry.
In no particular order:-
All are fairly cheap if you only sit the examinations (less than a weeks wages for the entry level positions they qualify people for)
There may be others (that are good value and in high-demand) - I just can't think of any off-hand.
Trust me, I'm a certified doctor of philosophy.
The question is not whether certs are worth the time and money (I tend to believe that they're not) but if you're putting them on your resume, who is actually going to check...
Another answer for are they worth the time and money - most definitely for the certification centres.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
I actually give -2 for certification. That's right, certification will, in my book, nullify the positive impact of an engineering degree *and* one relevant job. Why? Because it is, more often than not, a means of hiding shortcomings behind the veneer of something that seems official.
This is an absurd point of view. While it surely has SOME basis in reality, you are ignoring a large number of reasons people may have those certs:
Government work requires certifications. 8570.1 talks about certifications you must have in order to log in to a government network. The more responsibility your position has, the more certs you need. Would you reject someone merely because they were forced to get certs to be hired in a previous job?
Freelancers. Certs help them to get noticed. Small business owners want some sort of assurance that you are not just person who thought they would try and freelance with no skills. Do the certs really mean what the small business owners think those certs mean? No. It does not matter. When a freelancer is selling themselves, the only thing that matters is perception. There are some absolutely fantastic freelancers out there. Would you deny them a job?
Look at why they have a cert before you reject them for having a cert. You may find some gems.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Odd. My employer has invested thousands on training.
so there is nothing to learn on the job there? dare you name this company? sounds like a place i would not want to work.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
HR Departments love them like HR Pam loves cocaine.This is because, quite simply, many HR departments think that teaching yourself a language would be like teaching yourself to be a doctor. It is inconceivable that an intelligent person could actually end up being able to perform, on their own, as well as some guy who has a certification from the IT collage run out of the nearby failed mall.
This is generally the opposite of what most CS people know which is that the majority of drones popping out of the local IT mall "collage" are strangely incompetent.
But even worse I know people who have become certified in one of the major programming languages (I won't say which one because the people who use that language will not tolerate criticism) and the techniques that you had to use to pass were terrible.
But if you are trying to impress the HR drones in some mega-corp a certification will be just the thing. I am not joking when I say that if a guy named Mr. Stroustrup applied to work at my local power company that he would be better off if he had a totally bogus certification for C++, instead of the "self-proclaimed" title of "inventor of C++"
Certs are great for breaking into a new area and/or expanding your knowledge. They provide a logical progression of topics that help you learn in a meaningful way. Then once you finish the course/book/video series, whatever. You can test your knowledge against the expected norm. The cert itself will not get you a job. You take a cert for the knowledge. The piece of paper is just a perk.
I have a few certifications myself (Agile, CEH, DoD Acquisition...strangely, I don't have a PMP, but I've seriously considered it), and while I could tell you that those are bare-minimum and not worth nearly as much as I paid for them, I'm not going to say they don't have their uses.
Some companies, particularly ones aligned with the Government, DO require them rather strictly. It's not fair, and frankly, I think a lot of those bare-minimum ones shouldn't be considered worthwhile as "resume" material because they're so basic (they're really like saying you went to high school when you're presenting yourself as the holder of a Bachelor's Degree...the implication of learning the basics is pretty much built-in).
That said, there are intangible things that they do offer, like networking or getting you out of the office for a week or two, maybe teaching you something new or something you didn't consider before. If the cert isn't something that you were necessarily inclined to do in the first place, it may give you a new perspective on how to deal with people (as stated, I considered taking the PMP because I'm not a strong communicator when it comes to management; spending time around more "managerial" types may actually help me).
That also said, a lot of these companies know for a fact that it's a bare-minimum requirement, so organizations like PMI, DAU and EC-Council that have a foot in the door with the Government have curricula that basically writes them a blank check. It's obscene, in some respects, since a lot of the learning should really be on-the-job training as part of orientation to the internal culture of a place. I get the idea of an across-the-board minimum standard, and that's fine, but it shouldn't be used as a substitute for internal training.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
In my experience a broader view pays dividends. That can be achieved through secondment, introduction of new blood or with the best cost/benefit ratio by going through industry certification. Maybe an RHCE for a 25 year Unix sysadmin is questionable, but an Audit certification for your systems auditor will likely provide a view higher-level corporate governance and of course provide the assurance that your C-level suite will require.
Not everyone is working at grunt level for their entire career. Upward mobility typically requires expansion of experience, outlook and qualifications in larger organisations.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
I remember being new; I was in a class for Unix administration where the instructor pulled me aside and asked "why are you in this class when you know this stuff already?", well, two reasons... one of them was the reason I gave him then, I had no way to prove I knew anything and to get my foot in the door.... I was self taught from running my own boxes.
Now I realize there was a second reason, I had no idea what I knew, or where that would put me in the ranks of newbie admins. Turns out I was ahead of the game compared to many, but how did I know that? (and how did I know 15 years later I would still occasionally come across a tool thats been around longer than I have been alive that could have saved me time in the past, like...I just last year learned about the disown command.... do you know how many times I wanted that? )
Sometimes you need the boost in confidence and a little help past the keyword searchs to the interview. Its all about the interview, which makes it a good bit about being confident in the chair. Hell, I have seen some pretty incompetent people interview well and get jobs....because it turns out, its not just about confidence and knowledge but about problem solving.
Hell the best group I ever worked for would ask interview questions looking for answers like "I would google it" because, they didn't care what you knew, but whether you could solve problems that come your way.
I think once you are in the industry, or if you want to change your focus, certs/classes etc can be good for getting in the door, but once you have the experience, unless your jobs will be requiring it (and willing to pay to maintain it) then, I doubt they are worth it...especially some of them.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Are certifications mostly a rip-off, or are some (especially the advanced ones) actually useful, as many people insist?
Not a rip off. Although, IMO many of the people who insist they are worth something are actually people who already hold or are pursuing certs as their way to "get a job". Therefore, there is already a "sunk" investment in certifications, and they would likely be biased / in denial / upset, if it were a fact that their work on certifications were actually for nothing. I am just suggesting most of the people who care about the subject and insist certs are good are likely to have a vested interest.
Earning a CCNA, for example, gives many folks an ego trip; "I'm an expert now!". If all a person has to their name is that certification, and they don't actually have any experience to back it up ----- they're likely to be really upset if someone claims the cert is just a piece of paper. This in spite of it being well known in the industry that cheating with "braindumps" is rampant, and many, perhaps most holders of the cert. are not qualified pros, probably just paper certs, since over half the candidates took the "easy way".
I can think of two major uses for most certs:
1. Your prospective employer requires it.
2. You are a consultant and you need to show more letters as part of your sales pitch to compete against the other guy who has letters. Sometimes, whoever has the most letters wins the business, because the consultant is often a pro. helping clueless folks who have no real ability to judge expertise on their own -- so they are reliant on vendor certs.
I haven't talked to HR first for any job that I've gotten in the last 20 years. While I have applied for positions without knowing someone in the company first, the jobs I got were a direct result of my knowing someone that knew someone and getting me in front of the right people.
So .. if you are young and inexperienced and haven't developed a deep network of friends in the right places ... maybe certification helps.
Once you get an established network, they are of limited value. Studying and passing a certification often exposes holes in one's knowledge. So, other than for self-enrichment, I'd say they are useless. As others have noted, I pay little attention to them when reading resumes. Same with degrees.
I received Linux certification many years ago as part of a teaching gig, and was quite disenchanted when I discovered one other person in the class had never used Linux before studying and taking the certification. That's when I knew they were useless for determining whether or not to hire someone.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
I think the caveat is to know your market. It might be different in Phoenix, Dallas, or Cleveland. Know your job market.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It depends... is the certification exam like MCSE or A+, where it's multiple-guess? If it is a multiple guess exam where focus is more on definitions and "what does PCMCIA stand for" than actual configuration and troubleshooting, then yes, the certs are utterly worthless. There are plenty of MCSE-wielding clueless voids out there... ...or is the cert like the RHCE exam where there are no multiple guess questions, but configuring several actual servers (as VMs) in a (virtual) network, configure various services, troubleshoot others, where you must possess real, tangible skills? You may not know what PCIe or PCMCIA stands for but if you can pass that exam, you can be trusted with configuring a server.
Whether certs are useless or not depends on the exam style. One method shows you're very good at rote memorization but doesn't show the ability to actually DO anything tangible with that knowledge. Others allow you to not know the definitions of terms but prove you have actual skills and experience required to get the job done.
(I always use PCMCIA as an example in such discussions because the joke translation is "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms")
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
How do most people view colleges such as Western Governors University (the only one I can think of actually) that have aligned their degree programs along certification tracks? They award a degree after the basic college courses (math, composition, etc) are accomplished and the student accomplishes so many certifications related to the degree. I thought it was a novel approach to a blended cert-based experience and school degree showing ability to finish a school program. So a graduate walks away with a B.S. in IT Security and CCNA, CCNA Sec, A+, Net+, Sec+, Project+, Linux+ and a few others. That may be the most 'vanilla' of the degree programs there.
OMG facts!
While it's nice to get confirmation for the umpteenth time that certs (and formal education) don't mean jack in the realm of programming, it would be nice to have a more streamlined path available to juniors with little to no experience. I've done scripting and SQL for my GIS work and would like to branch off into development, though without hard experience in Javascript or .NET my resume wouldn't get a glance. I find it hard to believe that building my own superfluous toy website for its own sake at my leisure is the ticket to a job of following orders as part of a large team, but that seems to be the advice given time after time.
Would be nice if employers were forced to train like the old days rather than searching for a combination of qualifications that seldom exists and using that excuse to hire temp visas or something.
No, I wouldn't interview you because you mis-interpreted what I said to mean "no interview," rather than a -2 score for a single resume line item, as well as assuming me to be a manager, which I didn't say I was. Engineers need to be precise thinkers. Otherwise, though, I'm sure the rest of your extensive resume would have added up to a pretty good number in my made-up system.
The reason why your certification is both good, and still irrelevant to the posting, is that a pro-serv contractor is a completely different beast than a normal software engineer. Someone being put in front of customers certainly should have all the "pieces of flair" that impress customers, regardless of what they actually represent. My only assertion is about interviewing pure software engineers, which the OP would seem to be about.
Good grief, it's a resume point system. It's *supposed* to be over-simplified and callously reduce all the richness of a human being's life efforts to a single, faceless number. Its sole job is to efficiently extract a strong team from a given applicant pool, and do it fast enough to get the best applicants before other companies do, as well as not wrecking the team's productivity interviewing every candidate under the sun. A willingness to search for hidden gems may sound fair-minded, but it doesn't have a good outcome.
And, I hate to say it, since this will likely not help build agreement, but my startup-focused point system also explicitly dings freelancers, as well as former non-military government workers. So, despite your likely objection to this, hopefully you'll grant that the system is at least internally consistent.
My 25+ years of computer experience starting with a ti-99/4A puts me way above any A+ holder I've gone against 90% of them and thoroughly owned them. Of the remaining 10%, maybe 3% rank within my knowledge.
Certifications are bullshit and as always, only show how well you do on a multiple-guess question (which most IT is, now days.)
Put them in front of REAL hardware and more than half of that self-ranked top 3% will fail miserably.
It's that bad. America is seriously lacking in any real education since religion took over.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Certifications are little more than an easy HR screening tool and a way for large companies like Cisco to twist the arms of their resellers to get their staff certified because it looks good on paper. When I was an IT manager, I would get resumes from recent college grads with lots of certs, but no experience. Wasn't impressed. At minimum, all a cert did was tell me that the job applicant passed a test (and likely did so with the help of a braindump). Experience is what matters the most.
If you want to touch any systems with any kind of privileged access in the DoD, you're going to need some certifications in order to be approved.
It started back in Team Fortress Classic
It depends on the industry and type of job and type of certification. Example: When you apply as a medical assistant your A+ cert might not play a role. If you apply for a QA position at a medical manufacturing company your QA specific certs matter a lot.Some certs stick around for life, others expire in a year or so...like the Microsoft certs which cost a lot of money. I work in software QA on non-critical systems, any QA cert would not advance me in my position / company. I benefit more from studying new technologies and attending QA specific meetups.
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Certifications don't mean anything, but when you're charging clients an arm and a leg, they like to see some credentials.