Apr 10 2008
Certification Schmertification: Why They Are Useless
I used to believe that certifications were good to have in some things and useless in others. There’s an ongoing joke about Microsoft certifications; the one that comes to mind is the MCSE, which is the acronym for “Must Consult Someone Else” or some other variation. Honestly, other than Microsoft certifications, I figured most were worthwhile. I’m currently in a certification boot camp which is supposed to prepare me for a certification, which shall remain nameless.
What I’m learning from this class is that certifications are pretty useless. What these certifications want is someone that can memorize the material, most of which is useless, so that they can pass this “industry standard” test that certifies that they are capable off regurgitating useless knowledge. I wouldn’t think this, except for the fact that there’s a lab involved with the class. As we’re going through the lab some of the routers we were working with had duplicate IP address warnings. Now, I’ve never worked with this router and was working through the lab like everyone else. But I’m knowledgeable enough to know that you can just change the IP address. However, someone else, who has taken several networking classes and has certifications, decided to just reset the router to it’s default settings. Really? Because of a duplicate IP you reset the router completely? This goes to show you that certifications mean jack shit. Honestly, even if this guy had years of experience, I doubt that they would really know what they were doing. The way I see, the question isn’t how many certifications you have, the question should be, why do you have so many certifications? Do you have something to prove? Are certifications the equivalent of a Porsche?
That seriously made me wonder how worthwhile a certification is. I don’t think certifications mean shit; even Cisco certifications are dumb. The only reason I would recommend taking a Cisco class is because their shit is so bunk you need to fucking read books upon books to figure out their crap hardware.
Then on top of everything, I found out the score you need to pass the certification is ridiculously low. This really goes back to my other post. Hire people that know shit, not people that pretend to know shit. So while I’m setting shit up and understanding principles, the guy next to me knows how to regurgitate everything that he learned. I hope you like running a network with misconfigured routers running Windows ME. Super. Have fun with that.
I got my “Must Consult Poop” and “Must Consult Some Asian” in early 2000 with the hope that they’d get me better paid jobs; I was wrong. Work in the real world is nothing close to what the books & exams prepared you for. So instead of continuing to pursue my “Must Consult Someone Else” (3 more to go), I decided to learn by practicing. That resulted my computer unbootable several times and other times not able to login, but I learned a lot more than I would’ve from those books that prepare you for the exams. I continued to learn programming & system administration by keep practicing and solving real world problems; up till today, I have over 8 years of experience in the field, and I make over 100K without a bachelor degree nor MCSE.