For those of us in IT, we have heard over and over again and probably participated in the argument as to whether certifications are worthwhile.
We all know that having a certification in a particular technology does not necessarily mean we can trust the bearer of the certification has the skills that it claims they have.
Whereas that is true, most of us keep going in year after year for more certifications or meeting the requirements that ensure that we maintain the ones we already have. This is not a simple task; it is both time demanding and costly.
In a normal certification blueprint, there are probably half of the things there that will most likely never apply to your work and use of the technology as far as you can tell. This is the reason I love certifications—that 50% related to the technology that I do not use normally in my own application or work. This is the part for which my work experience and personal lab will not cover; the part that my next project or even job might need that I do not yet have.
A perfect example of this happened to me a few months after I had completed my RHCE. In the place I worked then, we used windows servers for DNS, so of course I never bothered with the intricacies of setting up a DNS server or any variant of that using a Linux server. I had set up a basic DNS server using Linux a couple of times in the past but that was just about it.
It turned out that one day after running into several issues related to newsletters we sent out, we decided it was best to have a caching-only DNS server set up just for our mail servers. Of course being a sysadmin I knew how DNS worked and in principle can always google or “bing” (yes, I use bing – a lot) on setting up and get it done maybe in 30 minutes or so and probably be confident enough to put it into production in probably an hour.
However, having done this severally in preparation for my RHCE a few months before, my confidence level and speed was far higher than would have been otherwise. Within 15 minutes, we had the server in production and already serving our numerous mail servers. It is for times like this that the pursuit of certifications makes sense. It of course does look good on one’s CV and LinkedIn profile as well, but for me, that is secondary.
When we use technology and it seems to function as we expect, we do not normally tend to question our understanding of the technologies involved. After all, they are working (or seem to be), so why bother when we already have more things waiting for us to implement and improve anyway? It is easy to have things in our environments that are far from optimal and if not for certifications we will probably never question our understanding of those.
I have several examples of these as well but want to keep this post curt.
I strongly believe preparing for a certification gives one a strong motive and avenue to learn.
As Edward Deming rightly said,
Experience by itself teaches nothing…Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence without theory there is no learning.
I hope this helps some people out there and gives them an extra reason to go for that cert or to hire those persons who go that extra mile to add some certs to their experience.