Why Certifications Are Necessary (Even If Aggravating To Earn)

Nerval's Lobster writes: Whether or not certifications have value is a back-and-forth argument that's been going on since before Novell launched its CNE program in the 1990s. Developer David Bolton recently incited some discussion of his own when he wrote an article for Dice in which he claimed that certifications aren't worth the time and money. But there's a lot of evidence that certifications can add as much as 16 percent to a tech professional's base pay; in addition a lot of tech companies use resume-screening software that weeds out any resumes that don't feature certain acronyms. There's also the argument that the cost, difficulty, and annoyance of earning a certification is actually the best reason to go through it, especially if you're looking for a job; it broadcasts that you're serious enough about the technology to invest a serious chunk of your life in it. But others might not agree with that assessment, arguing that all a certification proves is that you're good at taking tests, not necessarily knowing a technology inside and out.

Comments

They're worthless.

[msauve]

EVERY cert test I've ever taken tests not knowledge of the subject/product, but the ability to do rote memorization of the training materials, even if it's wrong. It's all a moneymaking scam.

Re:They're worthless.

[Anrego]

For that to work you need actual hard rules that everyone can agree on.

Sure, electricians and plumbers disagree around the edges (ask a plumber about sharkbite if you want to lose a few hours of your life) but there's a huge chunk that's accepted practice for good, demonstrable and easily definable reasons.

Software is still the wild west, and we're still figuring out how to do it properly.

Re:Oh look

[Anonymous Coward]

Conspiracy theories aside, I don't get why the hell Nerval's Lobster doesn't just have an editor account. I'd really like to know what the relationship there is.

Obviously he (or she?) works for dice, everything he's ever submitted is a link to dice and the URLs have campaign IDs in them to track the success of their shitposting. Do they treat this as if it was submitted like any other article, requiring it to get upvoted in the firehose, or is it just automatically accepted by whatever editor happens to see it first?

Either way, pretty unclassy.

Re:Meh

[Darinbob]

However for some tech jobs, if you have certificates listed on your resume then this will lower your chances of getting a job. Listing certificates is a signal that you haven't updated the resume since you were an entry level grunt. Outside of IT you will almost never see certificates except in technician jobs. The point of these certificates most of the time is not even training to be competent in some field, but for their marketing use (ie, all those certificate holders will promote Microsoft solutions to the end of their days).

The *real* reason

[alexhs]

We recently published on this site an opinion piece whose author was dismissing the usefulness of certifications.
We wanted to reassure our advertisers that the author's opinion was strictly his own, and not reflecting Dice's opinion in any way.
We at Dice are convinced that the certifications offered by our advertisers are indeed useful and even necessary.

Re:The *real* reason

[arielCo]

Interestingly, the Dice pieces linked close like this:

Conclusion

I’m obviously not a fan of formal certification. While many jobs require one or more, lots of tech pros have forged perfectly fine careers without them. Don’t let the complicated world of certificates impede you from pursuing what you want.

and

Certifications Only Prove One Thing

Malik’s supervisor, who worked his way up through the tech-industry ranks for 20 years without ever earning a certification, asked him how a career powered by certifications compares to one built primarily on real-life experience. Malik said anyone can pass a test given enough time to prepare for it; but that being said, certifications allow you to apply and interview for a role from a position of strength.

The answer of whether or not to certify is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. Take Sarin, for instance, who suggests companies look for employee traits that can be encouraged or cultivated beyond what they might learn as part of the test-taking process, even as they encourage employees to earn certifications while on the job.

What ultimately matters is if the candidate’s opinions about certifications align with those of the hiring manager. But with certification requirements not exactly going away, why not play it safe and take on the extra effort? If you guess wrong and skip getting the certification, you could lose out to the person who passed the test.

And the non-Dice article is the one that recommends some certifications.

But of course the actual content shouldn't get in the way of a good rant.

Certs are for noob's.

[Lumpy]

If you are a newbie or fresh from college, get a cert.

If you have 20+ years experience, Certs don't matter. Unless you have a clueless HR drone, then you dont want to work for the place.

If they discount your "15 years senior network administrator for AT&T" and want to see a entry level cert, then you really really dont want to work there.

Re:Oh look

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerval's Lobster is the astroturfing account for Nick Kolakowski, the editor in chief of the godawful SlashBI thing. He's still listed in the FAQ as an editor, even though he's officially moved away from Slashdot and is currently churning out content for Dice's godawful news division. I brought this up before, and was assured that not only does Nick not work directly for Slashdot any more, but that they don't post everything that he submits. Considering the last time he had a story declined was over a year ago, I have my doubts.

Also, expect to see stories about certifications, what programming languages you should learn, interview skills, and other fluff pieces from now on.

Re:Mod parent up!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is interesting but I'd like to see some proof of it.

"(Nerval's Lobster) actually worked for us before the acquisition, writing for our standalone news site experiment. Later on he moved over to Dice and took over their news site instead.

He goes through the same submission process as everyone else, and we don't post everything he submits." source

Not everything, just 570/767 stories. All of of the current ones have at least one link back to a story on Dice. The really old ones (from 2012 or so) all link back to his own stuff at the ill-fated SlashBI

"Nerval's Lobster (nkolakowski@slashdotmedia.com, nkolakowski@geek.net) submissions start to show up. We've [slashdot.org] already [slashdot.org] established [slashdot.org] that Nerval's Lobster is Nick Kolakowski, a slashdot employee submitting paid content as user-submitted stories"source (with lots more interesting comments linked)

See also: The Slashdot FAQ which lists him as Slashdot editor, his Twitter profile which lists him as a Slashdot editor, homepage which lists him as a senior Slashdot editor, Google+ page (same), LinkedIn (same), and so on and so on.

So, yes, can we stop with the charade already?

Re:Why are we even discussing this again?

[Xest]

Okay Nerval or whichever Dice employee you are you're just embarrassing yourself and your company now, please, just stop.

Certainly in the development world, no one who actually has these roles you're theorising about gives the slightest shit about certifications. I can say this with absolute certainty because I've made it right to the top in a large and successful company without needing any and similarly when I'm hiring I pay exactly zero attention to certifications because they do not in any way tell you anything about the competency of the candidate.

You see the issue is that anyone can get these certifications, so your theory of who can and can't get them is meaningless, even junior devs can get them if they can be arsed, but ultimately they're just not worth the money. They have exactly zero impact on employability (and some even have negative impact).

So keep theorising all you want, those of us who actually work in the field and have worked our way to the top will keep laughing at how wrong you are and how desperate your shilling is. Even if I genuinely wasn't capable of getting these certifications, I frankly wouldn't care, because it's had no impact whatsoever in my ability to grow my career, hence even if you were right (which you're not) so fucking what? It's still meaningless, they still don't matter, not having them still hasn't dragged my pay down at all because I'm already getting paid as much as a developer can get paid, and I still enjoy my job regardless. There isn't any other metric that matters that these certifications could improve even if they did somehow matter as you're desperately trying to claim.

Really, it sounds like you're the bitter one simply because you blew all your money on certifications and have no actual skills so the only person you could find to employ you was Dice. I guess it must suck being in a dead end Dice job, but at least you have your pointless and irrelevant bits of paper to flap around right?