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You are here: Home / Featured / Opinion:Certification Matters- Only you can do the study – Part 3

Opinion:Certification Matters- Only you can do the study – Part 3

9th October 2008 By Greg Ferro Filed Under: Featured, Opinion

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 book ((or website, CBT, course notes or whatever)) 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

About Greg Ferro

Human Infrastructure for Data Networks. 25 year survivor of Corporate IT in many verticals, tens of employers working on a wide range of networking solutions and products.

Host of the Packet Pushers Podcast on data networking at http://packetpushers.net- now the largest networking podcast on the Internet.

My personal blog at http://gregferro.com

Comments

  1. shef says

    10th October 2008 at 15:22 +0000

    i have seen customers, where managers prefer to train stuff and pay for that, but only without certification (because, if stuff will have some cert’s, company should pay more) :/

    • Greg Ferro says

      10th October 2008 at 15:52 +0000

      I would not choose to work somehwere like to would feel trapped and uninspired in a place like that.

  2. Stuart says

    3rd December 2009 at 18:52 +0000

    By and large I agree with all of your sentiments but I do also agree that not having a cert doesn’t make you any less of a potential hire.

    What I do take some objection to is your callous disregard of teh cost of books, exams and your end attitude (it would apper to me) of those that say they can’t afford it. You counter with “how much is your career worth?” but what about those that simply cannot afford it?

    I’ve been there and got the t-shirt (picked up free at an Expo somewhere). There were many days when my job was paying just enough to cover my bills and food (mostly) yet I’ve always wanted to better myself and move forward. There are those that don’t want this and your question is then potentially valid.

    Some folks – I was one – didn’t want to go into debt or borrow on the never-never (look where that’s got us all now) yet we get callously (it seems to me) accused of not wanting to better ourselves or invest in our careers. I was fortunate to get a reasonable job without the cert and was able to start buying books and garteful that this same employer was willing to refund the exam costs.

    Instead of berating all these folks – why not give back to them. If they can’t afford to buy a particular book then offer to buy it fo rthem? Or give away your old study material? Or … well I’m sure you can come up with your own ideas. Me – I give away my old stuff to any that want. Some of it may be out of date but it’s a starting place at least.

    • Greg Ferro says

      3rd December 2009 at 20:05 +0000

      While I respect your point of view, you should also see mine. I have fifty candidates, who do I choose ?

      In terms of giving something back, that is the entire purpose of this blog. To share knowledge and discuss freely.

      Publishing study information is difficult and I have copyright concerns becuase of where I get my material from. I will, however, try to do more.

  3. Bernardo Soares says

    5th September 2012 at 14:17 +0000

    lol, hire me
    spent all my money with studies / cert and still got nothing interesting…for over a year

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