Hot Diggety! Nick Webb was rumored to have written: > > > > Argument 3: > > Taking a certification is a good start to help you learn some basics, > > but you still need to have experience. > > This is always a hot topic. My take is mostly #3.
Certification is certainly no substitution for experience, but it does help in certain situations -- such as when you're expected to dive into a particularly complex technical subject area very quickly. About 15 years ago, I worked with people who were certified in IBM HACMP cluster setup on the IBM SP/2 (essentially a supercomputer for parallel computing). Insanely complex setup, mostly on the SP/2 side. Those who didn't have certification had an extremely large and steep learning curve that took them well over a year despite maximum effort. Those who did -- they hit the ground running and all was fully up within a month or so. They charged a huge premium for their services but earned every single cent of it as the time saved let the company roll out the product and start realizing revenue so much sooner. Not all certification programs or exams are created equal. Some truly are worth their weight in gold, while others aren't much more than glorified fluff. You'll never mistake Cisco's CCIE cert for being in the latter camp! All that said, I'd agree with whomever said it's often used to help give you a foot in door for a lateral change into a different technical area or with another organization. -Dan _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
