Opinion:Certification Matters– Only You Can Do the Study — Part 3

When its comes to achiev­ing cer­ti­fic­a­tion, only you can do the study. Making excuses for why you haven’t star­ted or about how much it costs, are just excuses.

Only you can do the study

The most com­mon com­plaint for not com­plet­ing /​ start­ing /​ doing a cer­ti­fic­a­tion is “my employer did not /​ will not pay for train­ing”. I regard this as lazi­ness ( or pos­sibly SSA). You can buy text books for a couple of hun­dred dol­lars that will take you through the pro­cess, and the exams cost a couple hun­dred too. How much is your career worth ? Surely more than that.

Let con­sider some points:

1. if you have the exper­i­ence, then read­ing a text­book should be enough to focus your learn­ing for the exam
2. Networking requires you to read, study and learn all the time. If you can’t read a book¹ to learn this stuff, then you pos­sibly are miss­ing a key skill for success.
3. If you can’t be bothered to spend a few hours a week to pro­gress your career, then don’t moan about not pro­gress­ing in your career.
4. And quit pre­tend­ing that you “have been mean­ing to do it this year”.
5. If you won’t invest in your own career, why should I ?

If you have no exper­i­ence, then using only a text­book may be dif­fi­cult and a train­ing course is an excel­lent method to over­come this. It will get you star­ted and help you with the areas that you don’t know you need help with. But don’t expect to get a train­ing course for everything that you need to learn. Simply, train­ing courses are an inef­fi­cient way to learn as the cost of the course and lost pro­ductiv­ity are a double whammy from your employ­ers per­spect­ive. You should not expect to learn everything from a train­ing course, but use them for those top­ics that will be hard­est for you.

For example, if your daily work involves fire­walls but not IPS, then a train­ing course on IPS would be more valu­able than a course on Firewalls.

Passing Certification Exams Matters

This is why cer­ti­fic­a­tion exams mat­ter, do a course and pass the exam. Prove that you learned something.

Read a text­book, pass the exam, that proves you want to learn — your man­ager is likely to want to send you to the next train­ing course.

When I am select­ing people to be on a team, I am look­ing for people who are think­ing, learn­ing and improv­ing. I don’t always expect you to know exactly what we are about, but if I know that you went out and paid for your own train­ing (classroom or self taught), then you are the sort of per­son I am going to hire.

Making you stand out

An unex­pec­ted side effect of cer­ti­fic­a­tion is that you are also demon­strat­ing your abil­ity to work alone and fol­low a pro­ject through. In most mod­ern IT roles, you will be expec­ted to work inde­pend­ently, and achieve com­ple­tion without act­ive super­vi­sion. How can you show this on your resume ?

Footnote

Part One Certification Matters — Experience Less So of this art­icle can be found here

Part Two looks whether know­ledge or exper­i­ence is more valu­able when look­ing for a job.

Certification Matters — Exams are not rel­ev­ant to Real Life — Part 4

Footnotes

1. or web­site, CBT, course notes or whatever [back]

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