IT Certification FAQ

A: ..It really boils down to one thing at the end of the day: What are employers asking for? Once you are at a company it is a different story, but unless you are content to stay at your current company forever, then you need to consider things that are going to be marketable to companies that don't know you very well.

Take degrees out of it for a sec. Would anyone get certified if there wasn't the perception that it will help you land another job or land a promotion at your current job, or possibly it just helps you keep your job in a downsizing environment? Of course not. No one would go plunk down $125 if they didn't feel it would have a positive effect on their career to have the paper. The knowledge could be learned without spending extra money to take an exam, so lets not presume that certs are required for people to learn a certain body of material.

With that said, it is clear that anyone who is trying to get certified is simply trying to play the same game we all are playing. I.e. job ads say, "We want CCXX's" so people go get certified. We accept that it is the way the game is played. Ok. But the same counter argument is often made--"Certs are worthless," "All people do is braindump anyway," "Why I just hired the dumbest CCNP the other day..." "Why do companies require certs because they are a joke?" ad nauseam. We recognize the flaws with certifications and then go get them anyway because at the end of the day we perceive that not having them will hurt our career and that having them will help simply because we see that companies ask for them on job ads.

Now that more companies are requiring degrees, people complain about these requirements. Why? You are already playing the "qualification game" anyway so why is it so objectionable that the game should now include a college degree? But no, people complain and say, "I just met the biggest idiot with a degree," "A degree isn't going to help me fix a router," "Degrees are just a waste of four years," "Only superficial companies require degrees," ad nauseam. Who are we to tell companies what to ask for? I'm not going to go into an interview and talk anyone out of their requirements am I? No. If I am going to play the cert game, why not the degree game too?

Hey, if the IT industry suddenly shifted to requiring a pilots license, I'd probably go get mine then. Yeah, I might think it is ridiculous, but I'm not going to win that battle through refusing to play the game. Petitioning against hiring practices in a NG isn't likely to have much effect either.

It is real simple folks. If you keep getting passed up because you don't have XYZ qualification, whether that be a degree, a cert, or specific experience, well then go get that qualification. Don't sit around and complain about what the proper requirements *should* be. And as easy as it is to sit around and disparage degrees, know that the same essential arguments can be made to disparage certs with a simple word replacement exercise (substitute "cert" for "degree"). In fact, a true techie should be just as irritated by the notion that he has to go learn useless trivia about a product to get certified as he would be irritated about the notion that he needs to have a degree in basket weaving. After all, it all boils down to jumping through hoops. Speaking from experience, the most valuable books on my shelf are not certification related--I learned more from various technology-focused books than I ever have from certification study guides.

Bernie

get both :)

University degree is a must if you don't want to be 50 and still configuring routers...
plus that it gives you and advantage over other job candidates in the long run ( meaning after you get the same level of working/technical
experience )...
another thing is, some jobs just won't pay you more than a certain amount if you don't have the degree...
anyhow, I think both a degree and a cert are good to have ... just my
opinion..

jorg

I would add that, let's face it, a lot of success is dictated not by what you know, but by who you know, and clearly one of the best ways to know people is to go to school with them.

For example, how exactly did Steve Ballmer get into Microsoft in the first place? Does is have anything to do with the fact that he was Bill Gates's old roommate at Harvard? Nah, I'm sure that played no role whatsoever. How exactly did Scott McNealey, despite not having a technical background, get to be CEO and one of the original founders of Sun? Did it have anything to do with the fact that 3 of the 4 founders (including McNealey) all happened to be at Stanford, with the 4th founder across the Bay at Berkeley, all at the same time? Nah, I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. How exactly did Jerry Yang and David Filo meet to form Yahoo? Did it have anything to do with the fact that they happened to be in the same graduate CS classes at Stanford? Nah, of course not.

The fact is, most hiring is not done through open postings, but through
contacts and influence. This is a huge reason why there is a predominance of certain alumni in certain fields. For example, it is no coincidence that a predominant number of top American government officials, whether Republican or Democrat, tend to be alumni of Harvard or Yale. Bush fils is a Harvard and Yale grad, Clinton is a Yale grad, Bush pere is a Yale grad. By the same token, the British political system is dominated by grads from Oxford and Cambridge. International finance tends to be dominated by grads from Harvard, Penn, and London. The American legal system is dominated by grads from "the troika": Stanford, Yale, and Harvard - for example, of the 9 members of the US Supreme Court, 7 of them hold degrees from at least one of those 3 schools, and an 8th (Ruth Bader Ginsburg) attended Harvard Law, but didn't graduate (she transferred to and graduated from Columbia Law). In case you're wondering, the 9th member, John Paul Stevens, is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, elite schools in
their own right (#'s12 and 10 in the latest US News top American
universities rankings). Engineering fields tend to be dominated by grads
from Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford, whereas the world sciences are dominated by grads from Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech.

The point is not to sit around flinging names of famous schools, but to
illustrate that contacts and influence carry an immense amount of influence.
It doesn't have to be alma mater-related. (For example, when Larry Ellison thought about starting the company that would later be known as Oracle, did he put out a public job posting? No, he got together with 2 close friends - Ed Oates and Bob Minor- that he met during his days at Ampex). But it often is, as the experiences of Ballmer, McNealey, Yang/Filo, Sandy Lerner/Len Bosack (the lovers who founded Cisco while grad-students at Stanford) can attest to. It's now what you know, it's who you know. All these people are richer than I can possibly imagine not only because they are driven and brilliant, but also because they happened to have the opportunity to meet other people who were also driven and brilliant.

nrf

Timing is everything regardless of the certification, degree, or other accreditation. While long term, a degree has more versatility in certain situations, it is by no means a guarantee that you will find the right sorts of jobs - tech nirvana (pre 2000) or .com bust (2001 to now). As others have said further on in the thread, who you know is more important than what you know.

Motivation is a more important factor at least in my hiring decisions. I have hired those with degrees, certifications etc. and those without. The vast majority if individuals I've had direct hiring responsibility for who were most successful did not look as good as other candidates on paper.

I worked for an organization that only hired the cream of the crop with 3.8 GPAs and higher (also worked for a company where more than 1/3 of the staff had PhD's). I did not notice much difference in either place compared to where I am currently other than maybe a bit more egoism.

Best of luck to you,

Evan

Certifications will not get you a job but they might be the deciding factor in getting an interview. If 5 people are applying for the same position and the only difference is that 3 have certifications chances are only those three will get called.

Now there is a more important issue than just certifications in your case
and that is your education level, which in some cases might kill you as most companies do have educational requirements. So you may want to invest in this area as well.

Experience is EXTREMELY important so don't forget that there is a flip side to your situation certified, educated, no experience, and unemployed. Always play up the experience and back it up with the certs and possibly a degree.

Daniel Lawrence
A+, Network+, MCP

source: alt.certification.cisco, alt.certification.network-plus
added: May 2003, June 2003

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