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IT Certification Less Important Now?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon May 01, 2006 04:25 PM
from the i-never-valued-it-in-the-first-place dept.
from the i-never-valued-it-in-the-first-place dept.
lpq writes "IT certifications, popular after the dot-com bust, seem to be hurting careers now according to this article in the current Eweek.com issue. Guess employers are getting hip to the idea that those who don't have experience or can't "do", get certified..."
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slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:5, Informative)
There is nothing in the article stating IT certifications are hurting careers. To summarize the real article:
I personally think certification is bullhockey, but I don't necessarily hold that someone has a certification against them. Doing so (subtracting value for certification) would be akin to disrespecting someone for having a college degree, and that doesn't make sense.
So, if you have certs, it isn't going to hurt you. What will hurt you is not having skills companies are looking for (unfortunately, the article is really a little thin on what those skills are. The article does list some very broad categories that are "growing" (whatever that means): Applications Development/Programming Languages, Project Management, Training, Webmaster and Security).
Bottom line, as it probably should be, you're going to get evaluated and paid for performance, not pieces of paper.
Correlation != Causation (Score:5, Insightful)
During the last few years there have been many diploma mills out there. What these numbers lead me to believe are those with real skills didn't have any need to prove it with a 6 week class and a cert. However, this isn't always true. We get up to 5% a year bonus for certs at my job. So most people assume to take one or two a year for that reason.
Certs aren't inherently bad. They are just a symbol of aquired knowledge. By that line of reasoning they are no more fundamentally evil than a degree from a state university. However, in practice, these short term training programs became about who paid most for questions closest to the real test.
I could throw in a antecdotal story of someone having cert x and being dumb as a rock, but I don't really need to. We all know one. And if you don't know one, you probably are that person. 2-8 week cert programs were a fad that HR depts ate up like so much confection spread upon my naked body. It couldn't last forever. PHB's are starting to realize Microsoft certs are a dime a dozen, Novell certs are losing steam (they are changing markets too quick and their customers aren't keeping up with their training), and Cisco certs are still somewhat valueable. But what is valueable now (and will probably always be valueable in the long term) is experiance.
Just a side note... Has anyone seen those Vonage ads on slashdot pwning the fad technologies of the week? It's nice to see sed and awk are still in style 8-)
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Re:Correlation != Causation (Score:4, Interesting)
If you need training as well, admin and tech positions are possibly the worst to train for. This is by far the most competitve market out there. Why? Because it mostly involves training and not that much critical thinking. Before anyone gets offended, I'm not saying admins are dumb. I do admin work all the time. I also do a million other things. I can tell you, being an admin is by far the most mindless part of my day. That, and tech work.
The part of the day that I have to think the most is by far programming. If you feel that's a path you can take, go for an acclerated AS degree at a community college. You'll pretty much be guaranteed work in the US as a programmer. It's not hip or sexy anymore and there's a severe shortage of good programmers in the states. If you want a middle ground, go for some sort of AS degree in networking. It's harder to configure a Cisco router than being a windows admin, but not as difficult as programming.
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention, MCDST is brand new. It's the like easy-cheezy Microsoft cert. The consulting place I used to work wanted me to get a cert every year, but they didn't care which one, and they paid... so... whatever.
The Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician cert is exactly that. It's what you'd want the kid behind the counter at the local pee-cee store to have before he works on your next door neighbor's computer. Like, how Windows XP Home works; how email works; how Office works. That stuff.
The bonus to the MCDST is that if you're going for your MCSA (refresher: MCP -> MCSA -> MCSE, in order of knowledge and number of tests), you can substitute the Desktop Cert (which is 2 tests) for the "elective" test. The MCSA is Windows XP Pro, Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2003 Server Network Infrastructure, and an elective. The 2 Desktop tests are easier than the options you're given for electives (SUS Server, etc).
And yes, an MCSA / MCSE is still worth something. People say you can just glance at a book and pass it, but the thing takes 9 tests, some of which are so anal that you do actually have to study, and it helps to have seen it in practice. How many people do you actually know with an up to date MCSE? I know 1. I'm sure on slashdot a lot of people actually have one, or work with a lot of people that have one, but when someone says "Oh, MCSE is a breeze, 10 minutes of studying and I could take it", take them up on it, offer to pay the $100 if they can pass "Exam 70-294: Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure" or "Exam 70-285: Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003". I bet you 95 out of 100 can't do it without studying.
On the other hand, I am glad I'm back to being a Linux admin, where things make sense.
~W
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
I got the MCSE NT4 years ago and it was easy. I mean REAL easy. MCSE2003 is not and is in demand.
Ask any CCIE+CISSP the worth of certs, even better, ask them their income. Especially the highschool dropout ones.
How to measure performance... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I do agree that scraps of paper are best left for janitors. (I don't have anything against janitors, but they're paid to pick up paper, I'm paid to develop software.) That's not the same as saying that people shouldn't learn new skills. I believe that technology advances fast enou
You are correct. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ideally, what you want is for the basic pay of the lowest paid to be comparable to the cost of living at an acceptable standard. (By that, I mean you can get an apartment that shouldn't be condemned, you can afford to meet your nutritional requirements, you can meet reasonable medical expenses, that sort of thing.) At present, there are many below "minimum wage" workers in the US who probably earn half to a third of what I consider an acceptable minimum.
True, there will always be a bottom of the pyramid. That is why you want automation. Machines don't need much, so put them at the bottom and raise humans to a more human level. It's not a perfect solution. I don't have any perfect solutions. But as a temporary fix, whilst society figures out what a perfect solution would look like, it sounds a lot better than what we have now.
When it comes to degrees and certifications, I do understand why rarity affects value. Again, it is supply and demand. On the other hand, breadth and depth of knowledge defines understanding. Merely knowing a formula by rote is nothing more than alchemy or religious indoctrination. It doesn't tell you anything of substance and the moment you fall outside of the straight and narrow, your knowledge becomes worthless.
(This is true of ANY educational program. I am definitely much more in favour of "Classical" or "Renaissance" thinking there, where context and diversity of knowledge was of the utmost importance. "Modern" education does better on the depth, which is important too. Knowing everything about nothing is just as useless as knowing nothing about everything.)
I'd prefer a system that provided continuous education and rolling tests throughout a person's life, or at least provide sabbaticals to approximate that. That way, you can dispense with a lot of the redundancies in the degree program and you can link certifications to a significant quality and quantity of knowledge.
I believe Britain has something like 60% of the population go through the University system now. That's not a bad start, provided the diversity is great enough that the degree has no value. It seems to work OK, but there are still more areas that need work than don't.
(By comparison, there are States in America which barely manage to get 54% of their population to even graduate High School. And, no, that's not because American standards are higher, when something like a third of those can't even find America on a map!)
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the number of deadweight lab partners I had, who couldn't program their way out of a paper bag, but were quite excellent at reading the book and regurgitating for the test the sort of knowledge that is only useful in the context of the actual application which they were incapable of, I myself have little or no faith in a simple degree. A lot of people graduated higher in their class than I did, but most people didn't do four years in two.
In short, the ability to pass a practical skills test trumps any and all pieces of paper, short of the doctoral level. I'd much rather an excellent programmer with no formal education (not the kind with weird ass logic loops and utterly non-standard syntax...a good one), than someone with a bs BS who can't do anything but wave his diploma around.
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
But, by all mean
Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
I, for one, had no certifications three years into being an IT manager for a telecommunications company, and none of our staff was certified either. However, part of the requirements for some business deals we were making at the time called for there to be so
Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:3)
That, my friend, is a very useful observation.
I've been in IT since 1970, writing thousands of lines of 3GL code and script to do what a one or two liner can do now. Half way or so between then and now I thought -- networks, better get a cert. Got the MCSE several years after dumping VMS godhood for bunny NT 3.1 and Exchange TR0, because I thought I needed it. Got one or two new facts from the
Re:slashdot summary is just plain wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Then you're going to end up tossing out a lot of qualified people just to prove a point. I carry certifications, but they're not for the hiring manager. In the last couple of years, I haven't talked to many companies that didn't at least do first-level screenings through their HR de
Opinions, all of them (Score:5, Insightful)
Some companies like people with advanced degrees. Some don't.
Some companies like people in suits. Some don't.
Do what you want, be how you want, and network. That's how you get a job (and more likely how you get one that you'll fit into).
Rule of thumb (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Rule of thumb (Score:4, Funny)
Although I agree with you in principle...
In practice, the Mauve Dragons of the Middle Management Plateau still yield before my mighty +3 sword of Spam Slaying (and other "useless" security expertise); My dual-classed L2AA/L4BS Geek-of-Many-Colors Resume still slays the trolls of HR; My numerous cross-platform Certs of Knowledge tame the most pernicious NixClone Daemons; And my White Male +30 racial modifier grants me (fair to the other players or not) a bonus to all rolls for find-treasure/performance-evaluation (nullified by any zone of EEOC or an attractive Half-Succubus apprentice competing for limited treasure apportionment).
Now if only I could apply that to WoW, I'd study my ass off for a PhD in Auriculture with a minor in Ebaynics. But let's not get too silly, here!
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Someone tell this to HR. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Someone tell this to HR. (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Someone tell this to HR. (Score:3, Funny)
The only real downside was the entire HR section was severely cranial-rectal inverted. . .
Great... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Great... (Score:3, Funny)
Growth (Score:3)
What I would like to know is, does this growth mean non-certified employees are getting paid MORE than certified ones.
If non-certs start with low pay, then it is just natural that they will get a bigger pay rise once they have proven themselves.
Re:Growth (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose if you factor in the opportunity cost of getting a certification (versus doing something else with that time that's more "real world" experience) maybe it could be thought of as 'hurting' you, but I didn't see any indication that people are paying less for certified employees than uncertified ones. They're just not paying more.
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Who does these studies (Score:3, Insightful)
That could indicate that certifications are less important to these companies... if they were all getting paid the same salary at the beginning of the six month period. But since we don't have that information, this study is pretty much worthless...
"This is a clear indication that employers are not placing the same emphasis on certification that they once did.
I wish I got paid to make ridiculous statements...
Given a choice between cert and degree (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, this is the cheap labor debate all over again. Those who are short sighted (looking only at the money-per-unit-of-time number) will go for the cert still.
I sold my soul to Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)
Within six months, I was our company's first SQL Server admin. A year after that, I was the sole developer on the newly formed Web Services team. Long-term, the certifications were a very wise investment.
Still, the bottom-line is that people were most impressed by my performance. Being able to study and pass ten different tests probably reflects on my sometimes insane degree of focus, rather than full comprehension. I barely passed my NT certification and only now fully understand the wacky security model.
Never really were important where I am (Score:3, Insightful)
Contrast to many (not all) businesses, especially large ones, where techno-clueless HR reps or upper level management are handling this duty. They cannot tell the difference between someone who can BS a bunch of buzzwords and someone who actually knows what they are talking about, so certifications are their crutch.
In hiring decisions I have been involved in, MCSE was sometimes viewed negatively. Not because of any anti-MS bias, but because generally people who cheerlead that aspect of their resume seem to have little else to offer.
Finkployd
As with anything... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, TFA points out the going-rate for certain Cisco certifications is on the rise. Not coincidentally, some of the Cisco certs they refer to are among the hardest to get. MCPs are easy to get, are more common, and thus do not denote any exceptional level of expertise.
Of course, I'd rather hire somebody with a mile-long list of successful projects they've accomplished than an alphabet-soup of certifications. In every hiring scenario I've been involved in so-far, I have always put the people who have DONE something ahead of the certification monkeys. Of crouse, if somebody with experience and "hard" certifications comes along, it doesn't hurt matters.
A+ certification looks bad, imo.. (Score:4, Informative)
Then I looked at the requirements.. It's a joke. To be certified in A+, you're basically acting like the sole set of computing solutions is the Windows platform. The example tests had questions that seem to attempt to lock you into the idea that only Microsoft products exist and all computer hardware is used to run Microsoft software. So, I decided not to waste my money to get certified.
It looks to me that if someone is willing to waste their time to get A+, the lowliest of certifications, that they probably are not worth much for their time. I think about 80% of the average Slashdot readers could pass the A+ exam no problem just by taking the exam. So, imo, the certification doesn't say much other than you waste your time.
I mean.. if someone put 'passed driver's license test' on his resume, wouldn't that maybe make you think he was 'special?' A+ is the 'special' persons' computer certification. It says, 'even though Bob doesn't look like he can function like a normal Internet user, he actually can because he's A+ certified.'
Re:A+ certification looks bad, imo.. (Score:5, Interesting)
My response was, "No, but I don't really think that matters."
They asked immediately (and in a snippy tone of voice), "Why not?"
I shrugged and said, "I used to teach the course."
If anyone asks for A+ for anything other than a simple benchtech position, they obviously have no idea what they need.
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Skills (Score:5, Insightful)
But paper often gets you in the door for the interview.
Re:Skills (Score:3, Informative)
Let's not even have (Score:5, Insightful)
".. those who don't' have experience or can't "do", get certified...""
Yes, I'm sure they do... but SO DO plenty of people who CAN "do." This is not an "either / or" situation people, where you either have experience, are smart/talented/whatever, OR you get certified. Some very smart, talented people realize that *some* employers do put significant weight on paper credentials, and choose to get certified as just one more part of the overall picture.
Evaluating job candidates is, at best, very difficult... any tool that give an employer any visibility into a candidates abilities is a Good Thing, IMO. No, just being certified by itself doesn't mean you get the job... but if you have to weigh two otherwise equally qualified candidates, and one has passed a difficult certification exam and one hasn't, maybe that tips the balance. Or maybe you have a guy with 2 associate degrees, two relevant certifications, and 4 years of experience, vs. a guy with a bachelors degree who's just out of school... it's not an obvious choice... again, you have to look at the *whole* picture.
Are certifications a panachea; for employers or employees? No, but to suggest that they have no value is just ignorant.
My Recent Experience Concerning Certifications (Score:4, Interesting)
When I first decided to get certs, I was a college dropout. I had reached mid-junior level in a CompSci track, and taken a local developer job. I was working at a local company doing web application development. This was in the same small town (50k pop) in which I went to school, and was looking to be a well paid fish in a bigger pond. My route was the MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) track. In 1999, that meant doing a track with 5 tests, two of which would be VB or C++ centric, a couple of electives, and the two hour "solutions architecture" test. Since I had done of ton of C++ in college but no MS C++, and had a lot of VB and ASP experience, I went the VB route. After passing all of the tests (self study), I soon found a well paying job out of state and took it. I was told that my certs got my foot in the door, and my interview and technical skills I demonstrated got me the job.
Now it is 2006, and I have almost 9 years of professional software development experience under my belt. I take pride in the fact that I have continued my self education sans BS CompSci. Recently, things got craptacular at work and I decided I needed to look for new employment. I pulled the old .doc resume files out, and seriously thought about removing all of the old MCSD crap. However, I left it in. And it worked really well for me. I found that recruiters still look for this stuff. I cannot believe how many interviews started with questions or comments on my certs. It got my foot in the door, again.
In the end, I am more than certain that it was my experience and my answers to some tough technical questions that got me my new job. However, I would recommend certs to anyone looking to prove their technical merit.
Cisco entry and mid level certs are whored out (Score:3, Interesting)
http://testking.com/ [testking.com]
You can download most any current Cisco exam, cram it, and become a 'professional'. I got my CCNP and CCDP the old fashion way - worked, studied, worked, studied, worked, worked, worked, recertified, completed three of four exams for the CCIP, worked some more. Now you can just download 'em. Cisco resellers are required to have people with certain levels of different things and most jobs I see wanting Cisco qualify the position based on the ticket you need to have to get it.
I've taken my first halting steps towards studying for the CCIE. Those words are in italics because I feel like I've just typed arranging a circle jerk every time I use them. There are so many guys six months into the process with no real skills and none of the talent needed who are circle jerking on their theoretical CCIE. Or worse, the guys who are six years into it, they've got their whole self esteem invested in getting those four letters after their names, and they just don't have what it takes. Its sad to see.
Whatever the case, CCIE still has value, and my job puts me in front of everything on the exam except multicast and I'm slutting about taking multicasting jobs at half of market rate just so I can tune up for that area.
I don't get the attitude about certs (Score:3, Insightful)
If somebody in high school (for whatever reason) wants to be a computer tech; 90% of the posters here on slashdot, would post that five years of experience is much more valuable than an A+ cert. Well duh, thanks for being so insightful, and all. But how is somebody supposed to get started?
Practically every real profession relies on degrees, certs, licenses, and the like. IT has always been a major exception.
Then the IT pros piss and moan about how their not treated like real professionals, and certainly not paid like other professionals. Imagine if a BSEE was optional for an electrical engineer.
You can't just hire somebody off the street to fix your toilet, or clean your swimming pool. Those jobs require licenses, certs, etc. But, hiring somebody to write life-and-death critic software, whose only credential is that he's the PHB's nephew . . . hell, that's done all the time.
Re:write on your resume (Score:5, Informative)
My current position as a *nix SysAdmin required that I take a long written (as in - paper and pencil) test on some rather complex questions involving Solaris, BSD, and Linux (e.g. - "write a script that will cancel all mail messages in a courier queue that is more than X days old and report/mail the results to all current admins"). Once I was hired, I discovered that most other people who wanted the job and wrote "UNIX" in their resumes would apparently come up against a brick wall rather hard if they didn't have the experience behind the ink.
But then, you can find out in five minutes at a shell prompt whether or not someone really knows *nix, as opposed to a GUI environment where a candidate can guess-and-click their way to success.
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Re:write on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:write on your resume (Score:3, Informative)
Bash now comes with Solaris. Not just 10, but recent disk sets of 8 include it as well.
Re:write on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
That is a little silly, man. I mean, I don't know how to do that, but I do know where to look. Knowing where to find answers is the most vital part of being a sysadmin in the linux/unix world, because you can never know everything, and every company has their own special way of doing things.
It's the same thing about programming. Learning to program, and learning how to program in XYZ are two different things. T
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Re:write on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
I was the last of seven applicants, and the only one without a university degree in computer science. I was also the only one to complete the project. From what I was told, it took all the other applicants with their certifications at least 6 hours to not succeed in a simple task that they weren't familiar with. I got hired on the spot.
Certifications don't mean shit. If I was hiring someone, I'd be looking at their project experience. What I'd be looking for is a series of successful projects that were NOT all the same. THAT is what demonstrates your capacity to fix problems.
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Re:write on your resume (Score:4, Insightful)
Systems Administation is about knowing what you know, knowing what you don't know and figuring out how to know what you don't know.
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Re:write on your resume (Score:3, Informative)
to an extent; but what if someone spent 5 years as a sendmail admin, and 4 years after that as a postfix admin? Sure, someone who spent 3 months working with courier might know exactly where the mail queue is off the top of their head, and how to use courier commands to purge it, etc, but I'd rather have the person who "knows more about mail".
That question isn't testing "knowledge of running a mail server", it's testing "Knowledge of specific courier things, and scripting prowess".
Right (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe *you* can find out in five minutes (Score:3, Insightful)
I have worked in IT over 25 years, and that is something I know for a fact.
Not Necessarily (Score:4, Interesting)
I think most people who've done a few rounds of hiring will easily note that people in that category simply don't have the required knowledge. Nor do they have the work ethic. A university degree certainly doesn't guarantee intelligence, but it does guarantee you that a person can make it through four continuous years of hard work.
Another point of note is that I once worked at a testing center where they administered many of the popular IT certification exams. It became obvious very quickly that those certifications are designed merely as a money making tool for the companies that produce them. They give you an idea that the person you're hiring can memorize screens and their uses, along with a few technical concepts, and their applications, but that's all they do. (It's also fairly common to find bootleg copies of the exams on the internet).
In the future if I see a long list of certs I'll probably just toss the resume away without going any further. There's no shortage of people out there, but there aren't that many good people, just more and more people with certifications and educations from silly little diploma farm colleges.
I know that I'm not the only who thinks this way too... so yeah I'd say it could hurt.
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Re:but seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, certification isn't for you - it's for your employer, and their customers. Unfair as it may appear to you, it establishes a baseline, one which I'm sure you far surpass.
"I preferred (and still prefer) to let my skills do the talking instead of jacking around taking some prefab test that any monkey could study for and pass."
No offense, but, if you're as good as you think, then certainly you should be able to pass some "prefab tests that any monkey could study for and pass"? And, I'm sure your company would be pleased not to have to pay to send you for training, but simply pay for those tests you can pass simply because you're so good?
If you're self-employed, then, not only do you get a certification, but, the costs are a tax write-off, too.
Just a thought: Why not try? Certainly, if some monkey can pass them, you should be able to as well.
There's only one way to find out
You graduated in 2000, yet you're so uber skilled that you don't think you need to be certified?
Hell, I've been doing computer service for over 20 years, I GREW UP with the PC industry [1], learned it as I went as did many others of my generation, and I STILL take tests, mostly to re-certify, and am often surprised by what I don't know, as I tend to take them cold since I rarely have time now to study (and, I like to see what I've learned, by experience, and compare that to what I don't know, against what they're testing for.. and many times, I learn new things that way, which I always enjoy).
Regards,
dj
[1] Started as a technician, in 1986, doing field service for a local PC sales and service company. Installed my first PC-based LAN in 1987. Server was an IBM PC-AT, 8 Mhz (the "fast" one, *grin*). Had a Seagate ST-4096 80 MB MFM drive, and we had to replace the BIOS on the motherboard, with EPROMS whose drive table we'd altered to support the drive natively, as IBM didn't support it... there wasn't such a thing as user-settable hard drive parameters back then.
Oh, and the NOS was NetWare 286, v2.0a. Compiled it myself, from copies of the masters... and does anyone besides me remember COMPSURF? *grin*
Ethernet was 'way too expensive back back then for our customers (small-medium sized companies)... we used ARCNET, running on coax... and while it was "only" 2.5 Mbps, it was token-based, and scaled well as node population per segment increased... unlike Ethernet, at that time, which didn't have switches available to mitigate collisions.
Now, of course, everyone calls Ethernet switches "hubs", even though they aren't... and we all ignore the performance loss that results from a collision-based topology, 'cause the hardware handles it, pretty much transparently now... except when it doesn't.
But, I'd be willing to bet, that as network speeds scale, eventually, collision-based Ethernet will be replaced with something that is non-collision based - probably token-passing based... but, it'll probably still be called "Ethernet", so as to placate the masses.
However, I'm wandering now.
Guess the last thing I'd say is this: If you're so good, go get certified... costs you nothing to do so, really.
And, it proves that you're at least as good as those that just passed
Me, I had the EXACT same attitude as you, back in 1992... I'd already been doing NetWare network installs for over 5 years by that point... why should I get certified?
Well, my boss wanted to become a Novell Reseller... and, that meant that someone had to get certified.
So, I did: He was cheap, and wouldn't pay for training... so, I just went and took the tests. They weren't offered in our city, so, I had to drive an hour and a half to where they were available... and, since I was the head tech, I couldn't stay away l
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Re:but seriously (Score:3, Funny)
Later, I'd learn how much I didn't know about networking, as the Internet grew - but that's a story for another time :)
I did an interview a couple years ago with a guy that had knocked out all his MS certs in 3 we