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Certifications

The need for an I.T. professional to obtain certifications is a controversial topic, one that we are very familiar with. Admittedly, our source is mainly chatter on the web. Nevertheless, we thought this would be a fun topic to write about, especially since we just passed our A+ cert exams.

Being a fun group, one of our members recently took another visit to the Microsoft site to see what it would take to achieve a rather standard certification in the industry. We report here on what we've found.

What was discovered was that the poor candidate for certification needed to pass a veritable gauntlet of examinations. Much of the study material consisted of what button to push on which screen. A variety of subject matter, from basic computer security to the design of an Active Directory forest would then challenge the candidate's patience.

Switch to reality. I.T. programmers have been decimated over the last few years. Many jobs have gone overseas. The jobs that are left are often not high-paying. Engineers are required to endure long commutes and work unpaid overtime on evenings and weekends. Cramming for examinations takes dedicated time that would be better spent on seeking opportunity. Common in many job situations is that a job description is overloaded and overblown. The poor I.T. employee arrives at a job in which he will often perform only one or two tasks of the overblown job description. The bureaucracy in corporate I.T. departments stifles creative development and the technician is found with tons of time on his hands.

As time passes, eighty percent of knowledge gained for the certification goes unused and enters oblivion.

The fact is that deploying any major infrastructure such as a Microsoft AD Forest will be time-consuming and is likely to be outsourced. If it is established by in-house personnel, there will be so many meetings that it will make your head spin. If the "certified professional" doesn't do some serious and arduous cramming, there is no way that he would have enough knowledge to take on the role of an SME.

We feel that the cram for certification is just an introduction to what will be truly needed on the job. As we have been running a help-desk here at Orange Crystal Consulting for nearly four years, we see that the skills required by a troubleshooter must run deep. Often certification only gives us the glossy top layer.

While we are impressed with job candidates that have made an effort to get certified, deep technical interviewing is generally required to probe the candidates real knowledge of engineering and core protocols.

Update. It was great fun preparing for and passing the A+ certification. Did it help us to troubleshoot Apple computers? No. Did it help us to recover data off of a dead hard drive? No. Did it help us to determine why a computer was getting a low 802.11b signal? No. Did it help us to learn ancient technologies? Yes! So bring us your 10-year old machines with ISA cards -- we are not afraid!