Friends in IT
Aug. 3rd, 2006 07:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laurierobeyThis is an open question to anyone who's in IT:
What's your opinion of certification? Are you certified? Have you ever known anyone to get a better job/higher salary/anything good out of being certified?
The reason I ask is I read an article a couple of months ago in an IT magazine where they said that most employers don't care about certification anymore; they're more concerned with proven experience. But in my experience, employers didn't care about certification in the first place. I'm sure there are some out there that require it, but I get the feeling they're like the ones who require a degree in IT, no matter how many years of experience you have or how many projects you've worked on; it's just a bureaucratic requirement.
I got my certification in ColdFusion 5 back in 2000 (not sure of the exact year), and never saw any real advantage in it. I do need to update my skills so they're not so "1999" (namely I need to learn how to do a CSS layout that doesn't rely on tables), but I'm thinking I'd be better off to just learn the stuff and use it so I don't forget it and so that I have projects I can show, rather than studying for a test that's focused on remembering syntax. That's what books and Google are for, you know?
What's your opinion of certification? Are you certified? Have you ever known anyone to get a better job/higher salary/anything good out of being certified?
The reason I ask is I read an article a couple of months ago in an IT magazine where they said that most employers don't care about certification anymore; they're more concerned with proven experience. But in my experience, employers didn't care about certification in the first place. I'm sure there are some out there that require it, but I get the feeling they're like the ones who require a degree in IT, no matter how many years of experience you have or how many projects you've worked on; it's just a bureaucratic requirement.
I got my certification in ColdFusion 5 back in 2000 (not sure of the exact year), and never saw any real advantage in it. I do need to update my skills so they're not so "1999" (namely I need to learn how to do a CSS layout that doesn't rely on tables), but I'm thinking I'd be better off to just learn the stuff and use it so I don't forget it and so that I have projects I can show, rather than studying for a test that's focused on remembering syntax. That's what books and Google are for, you know?