CompTIA Reneges, Reconsiders on Lifetime Certifications 245
garg0yle writes "Recently, it was reported that IT certification house CompTIA had changed their A+, Network+, and Security+ certifications — rather than being 'for life,' there would now be a recertification requirement through continuing-education credits (and an accompanying fee). Needless to say, this made a lot of people very unhappy, and today it was announced that CompTIA has reversed their decision. Basically, any certification obtained before 2011 will still be 'for life.'" Ars notes the coincidence that CompTIA contacted them about the change of heart an hour after Ars's story about CompTIA's initial switcheroo went live.
Re:CompTIA (Score:5, Interesting)
After I took it I found out that an NT guy with zero Linux experience passed it simply by studying for it.
CompTIA certs only impress people who don't know anything, and are helpful to get you through the HR screening by pasting it on your resume.
wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where's your Evidence? (Score:5, Interesting)
Certifications which mean something tend to vary by specialization. Cisco certifications mean something if you work in networking. GIAC or ISC2 certifications mean something if you work in security.
CompTIA certifications don't command respect anywhere, except maybe to differentiate yourself from the other entry-level candidates with no experience. After your first job, mentioning your CompTIA cert is like talking about where you went to middle school. Who cares?
Re:CompTIA (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't you mean accountants & PhDs in Economics?
Maybe you are right, but I don't work in banking. The MBAs I know are mostly small to medium business owners.
Microsoft had this same problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Being a Windows systems guy, I've kept my Microsoft certifications current over the years. (Say what you will...it gets you past the first resume filter if you ever find yourself in need of a job.) Back when the NT 4.0 certifications were rolling over into the Win2K versions, Microsoft introduced the concept of an expiring cert. Personally, I think part of this was due to the fact that Microsoft significantly increased the difficulty level of the Win2K exams to reduce piracy and try to revalue the credential.
People who had the NT 4.0 certifications freaked, saying that Microsoft had no right to invalidate their credentials. Microsoft reversed the decision, and made the certifications last as long as support for the product did. They still stop offering exams for new people, but people who have the cert keep it.
Does this matter? In my mind, no way. I can think of only one place NT 4.0 skills might be valuable today, and it involves embedded systems with no typical Windows user interface. (The New York subway system uses NT 4 for their fare collection machines.) Most places aren't using it for the general file-and-print server work that the certification was aimed at.
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
A+ (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Microsoft had this same problem (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
A doctor takes continuing education credits to keep up with the field but this doesn't mean his undergraduate degree expires. For anyone doing IT, the A+ knowledge will be kept current by being in the field. And for specific newer tech, there are certs to get up to speed on that. The VMware stuff is getting really hot right now, for example. A previous employer paid for A+. The class itself was a very thorough review of the PC from soup to nuts. It would help bring a young amateur up to speed in the field. I'd been doing this for years so it was really just a very thorough review for me. I think the best part about the class is it lets people see if they'd really enjoy the IT field. If you hated the class, you'd really hate doing this for a living. Learning that is worth the price of admission. :)
Re:CompTIA (Score:3, Interesting)
You are only partially right and the GP post is indeed very insightful. For most people, myself included, there were always the few very enticing intellectual "carrots" to offset the very many "sticks" in the academic environment. For every exciting subject, where I had a lot of fun and where I could indeed participate in a mentor/student dynamics with excellent professors, there were at least 5 "jump-through-the-hoops-and-keep-your-mouth-shut", compulsory, no opt-out, (and frankly utterly pointless) subjects. I hear that some colleges of 1960s era (the generation before mine) were far more fun and far less "follow the authority figure or else" places. But serf-mindset-indoctrination was well advanced (and rapidly expanding) in the place I went to by the time I enrolled. I hear it was not an isolated situation and the whole world of academia has been steadily evolving towards efficient manufacture of corporate serfs, complete with egregious advances in the indoctrination into "intellectual property" regimes and the concept of (publicly funded) corporate ownership of all research and student ideas.
Re:CompTIA (Score:3, Interesting)
And don't get me started on the classes that supposedly teach us math..
Re:CompTIA (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:CompTIA (Score:5, Interesting)
This is such horseshit. I found my time in college to be uniformly exciting and mind-expanding. I can't even imagine what kind of personality it takes to have never found a single college class be educational. It's like the whole "mentor/student" concept has a been a hideous gaffe for what, 4000 years?
My university experience matches yours. My work experience matches the GP.
Re:CompTIA (Score:4, Interesting)
Without altering its meaning, this can be rephrased as, "my perspective is different from yours, therefore yours is horseshit." How nice, you've elected yourself the arbiter of validity on a matter of opinion.
I'm fond of the way Samuel Clemens summed it up: "I never allowed my schooling to interfere with my education." If you are able to pursue knowledge and understanding for its own sake, on your own when no one is looking, because it enriches your life, you have found a much purer guiding principle than appeasing a professor, making a grade, or obtaining a job. If you cannot do these things or cannot do them effectively outside of an institution and hierarchical authority structure, then what sort of student are you? If you can and are doing these things on your own and take personal responsibility for your own education, knowing that no one has your interests at heart quite like you do, then the only thing left to prove to any employer is that you are not too much of a wolf, that you can also play the sheep who can follow orders.
A decent mentor will teach you what he knows and will probably enjoy feeling like someone is dependent on their guidance. It's a common way of feeling self-important. A great mentor will show you that you are capable of teaching yourself and will equip you to be your own mentor.
College (Score:2, Interesting)
I can't even imagine what kind of personality it takes to have never found a single college class be educational.
Oh boy, I'll tell you exactly the type. It's the person who fucks up and attends a yokel school on full scholarship instead of signing away his soul borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars to go to the ivy league, due to his family members being complete horses' asses unable to engage in any type of long-range planning whatsoever and unwilling to contribute to any kind of worthwhile education.
It's the person who spends every class surrounded by jocks and precious minorities with the IQ's of eggplants, interrupting class every five minutes to ask some dumb question. It's the person told by every one of his classmates that they are "just there for the piece of paper." It's the person who watches fraternities completely game the system by stealing copies of tests so that other members can memorize the questions and correct answers. It's the person taught by neo-con idiot professors whose only goal in life is to build the biggest guns possible for stealing natural resources from evil foreigners, and who spend more class time justifying this goal than actually teaching anything approaching enlightened subject matter.
Classes were certainly not uniformly bad, but the bad outweighed the good: architecture professors who didn't understand basic physics, logic professors who couldn't correctly decipher complex syllogisms, philosophy professors whose views on morality would make mobsters cringe. I have literally learned more from Slashdot than I did from college. The few good professors usually only lasted a few years, at most. The ones who remained were either brow-beaten or completely loopy due to the ridiculous bullshit they had to put up with just to do their jobs well.
I will be completely unsurprised when the higher education scam is the last card to fall in America's implosion of wasteful stupidity, after the mortgage, commercial real estate and personal credit debacles. Then again, I will be equally unsurprised if it never actually gets that far, due to the complete incompetence of our educational system being so well-hidden, near-universally-revered and unassailable, deep within the structure of America's faux economy.
Re:They probably ought to decertify me, actually (Score:3, Interesting)
The very concept of a lifetime certification is lame. I used to be something of an expert on Unix system administration — there's even a widely book on the subject that acknowledges me as a source. But that was almost 30 years ago, I haven't kept up with the topic (especially networking), and even newbie Linux geeks know more about it than I do.
If I applied for a Unix or Linux sysadmin job, they'd ask me a few key questions and then laugh me out of the office. Any smart employer (which is, admittedly, not all of them) would do that. Which makes a "certification" good for little more than making them take a second look at your resume. Or for landing a job at some incompetently run company that deserves what they get.
Re:CompTIA (Score:3, Interesting)
My take on University life (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me relate my university experience. I'm not 100% sure about US tertiary education terminology, maybe a Danish university is what you call College?
College is about having goals
Yes. My goals. Learning (about) Computer Science in order to become a better programmer. Getting straight A's on my exams. Learning the material.
meeting deadlines
Or asking kindly and slightly embarrassed for an extension, sometimes. You know, negotiate with the people who are dependent on your work (either for grading it or for linking with your code). Or, sometimes, yeah, just meet the damn deadline.
and dealing well (i.e. obediently) with authority figures
You're quiet in class out of respect for your classmates' desire to learn. You hand in your hand-ins on time out of respect for your TA. You follow the rules about which and how many courses you must take, but the constraints on your choices are well-aligned with your own learning goals.
Then again, I'm not shy about asking for clarification or "I think you missed the special case where [...]", or "You wrote X; I think you mean Y?". Your lecturer ain't perfect, and I'm not a perfect TA. I welcome corrections, as I sense my lecturers do.
your willingness to allow them to determine the use of your time
You choose your major and minor, and have a large degree of freedom in choosing courses once you got the requirements for a bachelor satisfied.
Similarly, you can choose to not work for Google/Sun/SAS if you don't like them. Or you can move around on the job market. And you choose whether to apply for the Marketing VP or the Software Development position.
Even when you work for the University, as a TA, the TA-to-courses allocation is done in a way that tries to optimize social utility. And intra-course time slot allocation is done by negotiation. You don't choose completely freely, but the authority in question tries to give everybody what they want (to the best of its ability).
your ability to follow their detailed instructions
"Solve problems 1 through 7 on the course web page, and 16.2 through 16.5 in $BOOK". Detailed? Instruction? I take that as a suggestion to help you learn. No TA I've encountered really gave a $MAKELOVE about whether you learned, although they were willing to help if you wanted to. You're free to solve fewer exercises, or more, and if you ask questions beyond the curriculum, most TAs and professors are willing and even eager to have a fruitful discussion with you.
and your willingness to be a cog in a large institution.
In the University, the institution is there to serve you. You don't make it run, you consume its output (the output really being the process).
Yes, there are resource constraints. The courses start aligned at semester boundaries. Some courses are only held every other semester/year/period due to too low attendance if it was held more often. So what?
Maybe US Colleges are very different from Danish universities?
I think the most important thing you learn besides your subject matter (i.e. the math, programming, anthropology or whatever) is to plan and organize your own learning efforts. If you learn that. I'm on my 6th year (phd student) and I'm just beginning to need to think about what I can do besides showing up for lectures and exercise sessions in order to learn the subject matter.
You don't take advanced degrees in assembly line manufacturing. I see how the qualities you claim College teaches students might be useful there. I think the qualities I've observed are more useful in knowledge work.
But to be fair: fitting into a large organization and agreeing to use you time on what others suggest is useful if you work at a large company. Then again, you're free to seek employment at Google where you get to spend 20% of your work hours rather (more) freely. I think they see individual entrepreneurial spirit as a useful thing.