The technology industry is full of acronyms.  You’ve got LAN, WAN, CPU, and DSL.  We’ve got OSPF, EIGRP, BIOS, NIC and MTU.  How do you find someone that understands what they all mean?  Do you look for someone with some level of certification?  Maybe you hire someone with a CCNA, CCIE, MCSE, MCP, MCITP, RHCE or a VCP?  See the problem?

The industry is evolving so rapidly that it’s impossible to find people that understand it all.  The best you can hope for is someone that has a good understanding of several different areas but specializes in one or two.  Certifications may be able to help but use caution.

I’ve held Novell and Checkpoint certifications in the past but they are not current since I don’t use these technologies anymore.  Over the last 10 years, I’ve become a little skeptical of most technology certifications.  When “certification schools” like MicroSkills started popping up promising a certification, a great job, a Porshe and a beautiful girl to anyone in just 60 days, the market was flooded with certified people but no real world experience.

Now, I’m studying for my CCNA certification and I’m starting to question the value.  A lot of the material is extremely valuable to any IT professional.  An understanding of the OSI model, routing, switching and firewalls are the basic building blocks of every networking career.  But as I take the practice exams, I find myself questioning the value of the certification itself.

The exam doesn’t seem to be testing my knowledge of the various routing protocols and networking fundamentals so much as it’s testing my ability to memorize cryptic, arcane, vendor specific syntax.  I get it….this is a Cisco certification so it’s going to be vendor specific.  But is it more important that I understand how OSPF or EIGRP works or that I’ve memorized specific commands that aren’t even the same between different devices from the same manufacturer (Cisco routers and ASA’s both run IOS but command syntax is significantly different).

Would you rather hire a person who knows the technology and can implement and support that technology or someone who memorized the syntax for equipment that you *might* have, passed an exam and received a certification?  There’s no right answer.  It’s quite likely that two potential hires with CCNA credentials could fit either description.

I’m not saying that certification is pointless.  I just believe that the the whole certification process has become watered down as it has been turned into a money grab for vendors and training centers.

What will it take for certifications to regain the value they once had?  When will I be able to trust a string of acronyms on a resume?

Popularity: 26%