Resubmitting with a subject line since original post was rejected by mailman filter rules.
-- Arun Khan ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Subject: Re: [Ilugc] (no subject) Date: Tuesday 08 Dec 2009 From: Arun Khan <[email protected]> To: "ILUG-C" <[email protected]> On Tuesday 08 Dec 2009, Vagmi Mudumbai wrote: @Mudmbai -- I suggest that you blog the first 4 paras of your posting. They capture the essence of the certification training market, especially in India. With respect to certification, my own experience has been that the candidates treat them like their university/diploma exams, pay through their nose for boot camp sessions and pass the exams with flying colours. Their objective is to get 80% or higher; in their minds they think it puts them in a better position to negotiate for a higher salary. Yet, you give them a simple day to day type problem to solve and they end up taking inordinate time to solve it (if at all they can solve it). I run a small IT infra management consulting service in Mumbai. We manage the whole IT infra of small companies. Over the last 24 months I have interviewed close to 60 candidates for entry level admin positions. Majority of them were certified for a very popular commercial distro in India. We conduct a quiz of 45 questions on the fundamentals of Linux and Network configuration. About 25% of the questions are ambiguous (deliberately); to test their adaptability of their (book) knowledge. The best score that I have till date is 15/45; this was a guy who had given his cert. exam two weeks before the interview and had scored 85%! Another candidate (with 90% in the cert. exam) kept on trying to connect to the openLDAP server for one whole day w/o verifying if the service was running or not! Then there were candidates who wanted to be "Network Admins" with absolutely no aptitude in that field. Why Network Admin? The salary is good! After the above experience, I tell the candidates upfront - their certifications are **worthless** if they cannot demonstrate their ability to solve real world problems on the client's systems and network. With the above frustration, I have started a 3 month internship program (stipend with intense training on the shop floor) and it is working out. To the OP I would suggest that you figure out which market segment you want to be in, what **you** are **passionate about**; not what your friends and family tell you. Begin to think for yourself - no harm in asking questions but make your own decisions. Get into an internship program and slog it out - get real hands on experience and then take the certification exam. I guarantee that you will be a worthwhile certified engineer in that domain and not a paper tiger like the majority of your peers. -- Arun Khan ------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [email protected] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
