Do companies know what a MCSE is?

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Nope, it's the same here in the states too.

I actually went on an interview where I proved to them I had the skills and knowledge to do the advertised job, and all the certs the job required, but because I only had MCSA and not MCSE I didn't get the job. Oh well, their loss, not mine.

I can see CCNA being a requirement. In my current position, I'm logged into CIsco routers all day long either configuring them or troubleshooting customer problems. I do not have my CCNA, and so far they haven't pressed the issue, mainly because the ad I replied to only asked for A+ and Net+. They did tell me that if I needed to get CCNA they would pay for it.

 

I think that it depends on the company, and what there core business is.

Some companies don't care what qualifications you have as long as you can do the job. I went from working for an IT company where certs meant everything, to a school where they don't understand what a cert is worth, if it wasn't academic they just weren't interested in knowing about it. (Hence why I'm doing a degree)

A lot of jobs I have seen advertised recently state must be MCSE or equivallent, this seems to hint that they have an idea of the level of knowlede required to hold MCSE, but don't actually know what it is.

For the lower end jobs I have only seen references to having at least X much experience, no mention of certs.

 

its more to do with whos doing the hiring,
MCSE is a buzzword as far as most recruiters/hr departments are concerned, they consider mcse = good tech

this has somewhat changed over the years, as people of the nt4 mcse generation progress to management roles and such, there is alot of firms now who throw the 'or equiv' line in, because they want the skills, not the cert, a much better direction

remember that any company with an affiliation to either cisco/microsoft gets benefits from having more on staff, for instance you cant become a cisco gold partner unless you have X CCIEs on payroll, and MCSEs hired my a MS partner can use thier qualification to boost the companies status/specialty
so it works out a tad different in that arena

 

That would explain the companies that press their staff to go and get CCNAs and MCSEs- I thought they were doing it to be nice!

There really is no such thing as a free lunch is there...

I do find it odd seeing some of these helpdesk and 1st line roles that say 'don't bother applying unless you are MCSE'

 

lol yeah right I am going to spend three years and god knows how much money, studying my heart out to learn how to design an international Active Directory Enterprise. Including how it can be integrated to interoperate with so called legacy (BIND) DNS servers, Netware, Macs, Unix etc. I am going to go through seven of the toughest exams I have ever sat. I am going to entrench my mind in a never ending amount of study and practical experimentation, so that I can answer inane questions on a help desk

I don't think so

The vast majority of the people I come into contact with in the real world have no idea at all what it means to be a real MCSE. I have to admit that before I started my quest for the four letters, I also didn't have a clue as to how much knowlege and experience an MCSE needs to have!

 

Indeed Blue, it takes allot to become a "Minesweeper Consultant / Solitaire Expert"


I'd not heard that one until last week, but it made me chuckle.

 

Sweet! I'm there!

 

Well, I don't know about overseas, but here in the states if you have a "paper MCSE", meaning you have your MCSE cert but no experience, then a help desk job is exactly what you are going to have to do in order to "get your foot in the door" in the IT world. It's called paying your dues. I have yet to hear of anyone who went through the MCSE course and then straight into a senior network administrator position with no experience.

And to give you an example, the company I work for is running an ad for a sr systems engineer. Here's part of the ad:

 

This isn't odd at all. It's the state of the industry. What I mean by this is companies will require what they can get away with. If jobs are scarce compared to the number of people looking for work then the companies will keep on raising the bar until the job vs. available potential employees ratio starts eroding badly. So, when you see, as is seen around this area, helpdesk jobs that require a Bachelor's in Computer Science and/or an MCSE just to get your resume considered you can know that the job market is very employer friendly, i.e. there are many more applicants than jobs. They are squeezing blood out of a turnip, so to speak.


Look at job description The_Geek posted. There are very few people in the industry who can qualify for that position with only 5 years experience. The company is headhunting. They've written an almost impossible-to-fill set of skills and are just skimming the resume's to see what pops up. At least that's my guess anyway.

What makes me think that? Very few people have database design experience and the sum of the other skills too. Database design, when done right, is a very specialized area. Unless someone just happens to get in the right place at the right time you're not going to be designing databases in any of your first jobs. I've seen a first-time design effort before and it was horrible. I didn't realize how bad it was until after I worked through my MCDBA and studied a book on database design. IOW's, it takes a lot of targeted knowledge and experience to do database design work.

I'd still be leary of taking on anything more than some simple database designs to start with and yet that job description required database design experience and multiple programming languages, multiple server OS experience, network management and project management all at once yet only required 5 years on the job experience. Only someone in the 99th percentile in computer smarts could even hope to fill that job description with only 5 years experience. It's an unrealistic set of expectations at best. At it's worst it's a way to beat people down so the company can keep their wages as low as possible by saying well, we offered this job at this wage. You only fit a portion of the required skills so we won't offer you the job at this wage. We will only offer you a portion of the wage.

The games being played by employers in this IT job market are far less than ethical.

 

Well, it is an actual opening we have. We got the internal email before it went public. But I do believe they will gather a "resume pool" and then sort through them all before selecting the ones that come close to the job description.

 

But that's the point. They say it is a position that only requires 5 years of experience, but then they tack on required qualifications that take many years of experience to gain. They are asking for a programmer, network guy, database designer, multiple server OS expertise found only in large environments, and project manager all rolled into one. They are asking an awful lot for a position that says it only requires 5 years of experience.

You've been working about a year, how close do you think you would be to filling the advertised requirements in another 4 years? You figure you'll have gained competency in about a half dozen programming/scripting languages, designed a few databases, admininistered Unix in an Internet environment for several years, and managed a few projects along the way with the networking skills you're now gaining?

 

The MCSE cert is not aimed at beginners, it is supposed to be for experienced IT admins. I had seven years of experience before I started on the MCSE track and still found it tough.

Maybe the people canvasing for help desk employees should state that they are looking for paper MCSEs or people that have braindumped their way through

I agree with Freddy, the job advert is unrealistic and is very unlikely to catch the eye of the perfect candidate because they don't exist

 

And not to get off track of the MCSE thing, but I get home today to find this in my email:

I love #11:

11. No benefits with this position. Salary range 35-40K.

$35-$40k a year for a part time gig. Damn right I sent my resume.

 

Out of curiousity, what was the name of recruiting agency? You might pm me with it if you don't want to post it publicly. I've talked with a couple recruiters that sent me stuff like that, but I never went for it because it always seemed to be too good to be true.

I'm always suspicious of those "openings" that promise big money, require very little in the way of knowledge, and say it doesn't take up much of your time. It always looks like social engineering to me.

 

Six calls a day fixing hardware related problems is not part time work IMHO. Fixing computers is very time consuming. I have been in the service industry for a very long time, since 1969 to be exact. I have been a field technician, a service manager and a troubleshooter for most of my working life. You have to take into account the travel time, time it takes to find the client, time it takes to find somewhere to park and the time it takes waiting for parts and supplies to arrive. And you need to administrate the paper work. It sounds pretty full on to me