If you have an IT degree, why take certs?

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I think it's important to remember that a degree and certs are different, and trying to compare them is like comparing an elephant to a piece of cheese.

I'm sure it would make an interesting conversation, but it would be pointless.

If I had to sum it up, I would compare a cert to a driving license and a degree to a qualification in mechanical engineering.

If you want someone to drive a car for you, you need someone with a clean driving license.

If you want someone to build you a new type of vehicle out of chewing gum and paperclips, you need somone who has a qualification in mechanical engineering.

He won't necessarily be any good at driving it when he's finished though...

Each to his own!

 

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Holy moly! I'm gonna have to respond to this when I have a chance to consume it all...

 

I think it's more to-do with IT industry as a whole, why would there be certs especially from Microsoft and Cisco in particular if the had confidence in the current education system.

The reason for these certs is that they know that a IT degree does not not teach you how to use the product that there business depends on, and they cant be arsed spending loads of cash on to supporting there products, Lets be honest, without CCNA/CCNP/MCSA/MCSE etc there phones would never stop ringing asking for support. It's not as if they make a great deal of money from them, most likely they are 0.1% of there income per year.

Any other industry, a degree will be all you need. But IT is a different story IMO.

 

Good point, I have heard IT business leaders such as Bill Gates express the opinion that university degrees may not always provide the best preparation for a career in IT (and he himself dropped out of his degree studies to start Microsoft). I considered studying for an M.Sc., but was not inspired by the course contents, much of which I thought were too 'generic', and even out-dated, and I think I got a better deal and learned more by taking on the A+/N+/CCNA.

 

The likes of the current technologies like Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle change their software very frequently to keep upto date with business demands.

However, the universities do not have the finance to this change or better still concentrate on a particular vendor cert hence the importance and need for certification. The point is that degrees are very valuable and cannot be compared to certs period.

 

well said

 

Very true.
And above all:Most certs are product specific, so in taking an exam for a cert you prove/show you have specific knowledge on a specific product. One could have a IT degree, but does this mean he has knowledge on building an Oracle 10 database, a progress database system, configuring a cisco firewall, a SBS, a MOM system, Juniper routers, programming ASP, setting up SMS, exchange 2007, IBM systems, and so on, and so on, and so on, and so on

 

Just read through the following replies. Not much to add really beyond the fact that certs appear to be there for product-specific knowledge, and degrees as a more demanding generalisation of such products - at least as far as I see it.

Given what has been said thus far it would appear that particularly IT degrees (not computing or any other) have little to no value for such graduates, simply because it doesn't prepare them for the world of IT. Regarding the necessity of vendor-specific certs I am of the inclination that they are there as a money spinner both for the vendors themselves and the centers. Looking over everyone's certs here, the range does vary quite considerably, yet there are very similar levels of knowledge. Maybe I could be wrong on that score, but that is my own perception that calls into question the value of each indivdual cert; you know the 'good' ones from the 'bad'.

I just learned something new in that cert exams are entire multiple choice based? To me this brings into question the candidate's suitability for a job since chance has been introduced into the final score. An example being that a marginal pass candidate might have actually failed if they where provided with a question and a blank sheet with which to answer. Multiple choice questions also allow for prompting. This brings down the overall quality of such a route into IT.

It's just my opinion that certs should be toughened up; it's not that there will ever be a shortage of takers for IT roles as far as I can see, so the industry an afford to be more picky.

 

Certs are multiple-choice mostly (I suspect) because automated marking is made possible. If you have to compose an answer in your own words this makes automation very hard, they would have to be manualy marked. This would drive costs up, and also introduce delays.

Harry.

 

Makes sense, but that does nothing but damage the cert reputation even more.

 

Not completely MC. It depends on the exam vendor (Comptia are mostly MC). Microstoft has a variaty of question types. They have drag and drop, point and shoot, build a tree, simulations. Cisco also has fill in the blancs as an extra sort. They also have testlets and simlets, but I see these as a sort of sims and MC.

 

To sum it up Certs have a lot of value as they are usually specific to a certain area of IT i.e development, Helpdesk, programming etc. I think Degrees are too generic and whilst I'm glad I did mine it didn't teach me in depth. Think of it this way IT certs is like being Corgie registered as a Gas Boiler Engineer. That is the sign that the person is qualified to do their job the same way as an MCSE is designed to let an employer know they are up to standard to do the job (or should be).

 

Not that many certs teach programming, maybe the SCJP, they mostly only certfiy you know a framework, IDE or set of API's.

My Degree/HND education was pretty good, partly because of the courses and partly because of the modules I took and the effort I put into studying those modules and reading around the subject. I learnt alot of programming in COBOL/Ada/C/C++/80x86 Assembler at college, that has really stood me well in my career.
Alot of courses mix theory with vocational skills well these days, there really does not have to be the disconnect people seem to think exists. Some courses even support cert paths. My degree was in Computer Science, ok so it was generic in some sense but I made sure I tailored it towards Software Development with my modules, others did the same for Networking etc. I didn't water down my degree with IT or business where I could avoid it or take any easy options.

Sure people can coast through a degree. Any method of study is only as good as what YOU put into it. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink...

 

Very true. Most courses do not train you to program, they train you to code. As I see it programming is a way of thinking, some people wil never get to that. They can produce a program allright, but all the special stuff and nifty bits are beyond their grasp.
You will not learn to program in a 5 day course.

 

I think that degrees and certs both have their usefulness however in the programming world, I have honestly never seen a cert in the essential or desirable criteria for any job I was interested in. It usually asked for a third level qualfication (Degree, HND etc) which demonstrated a strong programming background. I am aware though in the network/support field that certs seem to be requested in the criteria. I have never needed to obtain a cert, nor do I have any real interest to. Pretty much what I have learnt has come from the world of work or has been self-taught. Although I have a degree, a lot of it was useless and focused a lot in writing up technical documentation and being able to quote some dude who was a professor in some high profile UK or American University. I have seen people graduate with first class or 2:1 degrees who did not have a clue how to adapt to the world of web programming. Likewise there are people who got pass degrees, 3rds or even failed who could do the job better. I would possibly consider a cert for self-progression but many of the courses I have seen on offer use outdated technology (Asp.Net 1.1 etc.).

 

My view of Certs are that they are designed to compliment work experience, in fairness I probably waited 3 years more than I should have done to start obtaining certs, but eh thats life.

What they (and the degree) are good at is showing on your CV you know the theory, and with some practical ability (ie the sim questions), the work history part is what should be providing the hands on, commercial experience of using various technologies.

The only advantage i think the Certs have, is that you can be earning in the meantime.

My HND (I know its not a degree) is worth less than my certs to me personally.

 

I hadn't seen this thread before but I will agree with Mathematix.

Certs are a poor substitute for education. Most people see them not as education, but as a means to a job, and in that distinction lies a crucial difference. Many cert holders are after a piece of paper that they think is going to be the equivalent a job in IT. That starts them off on the wrong foot to begin with as most certs, and all the MS certs I've seen, are basically point-and-click with very little teaching of fundamentals. That leads to a person who passes a cert but does not have real life experience thinking they really know something when just the opposite is true.

I ran across a very interesting post on ZDNet about MCSE's and Linux. I think the blogger is right on in his line of logic. His premise is that most MCSE's are point-and-click gui guys who really don't understand the underlying principles because their choice of education--certifications--doesn't teach underlying principles. Thus when they see a Linux machine they are thrown for a loop because administering one is not all point-and-click but based on understanding underlying principles of operation and applying them to different aspects of an OS.

To me being introduced to Linux was like "coming home". But, I'm far from the "norm" when it came to studying for my MS certs. I built up a library of over 100 books studying underlying principles of operation rather than assuming I could work on a piece of technology in real life just by knowing where to point-and-click to do what a book tells me will accomplish a certain task.

I'll just about bet that less than 5% of the MCSE's on this site used more than 5 or 10 outside books to study for their certs. Why? They didn't study to learn principles as MS has never, and I repeat never, made their certifications about making sure people understood underlying principles of operation. They have made it all about just having to point-and-click, and I for one find that a very poor substitute for real learning about how computers work.

Here's the link to the ZDNet blog about why most MCSE's won't learn Linux. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=1137

 

I agree that they are product specific, and they are teaching and testing whether people can use its os and the support tools it provides.
Also as well they do teach people to be methodical in there testing of the os, some some other non MS skills are being developed.

It has to be said that the 70-291 exam (just using this as an example) does get people learning things such as IP & subnetting, DNS (how it works and its purpose) and some other network fundamentals, so to say it is just teaching people to point and click is a little unfair.

 

I disagree. You can pass a MS cert with flying colors and not be able to diagnose a real world problem at all. MS certs do not teach enough theory to be able to troubleshoot, and if you can't troubleshoot a protocol breakdown or server malfunction then you really don't know enough to say you understand what's going on.

As to whether or not an MCSE teaches how to use MS support tools or not I'll disagree once again. I went through the MCSE 2000 process and the certification process brought up how to use 2, that's right 2, of MS's command line troubleshooting tools when literally a hundred or more existed at that time. They are the most powerful and flexible troubleshooting and repair tools MS has, and the certification process barely lets you know of their existence. I taught myself how to use quite a few of them, and I found that they helped me solve a myriad of problems for which the gui was completely useless in both troubleshooting or solving.

MS certifications are not education, and anyone who mistakes them for that is making a large mistake.

I have to say at the time I studied the book that introduced the 2 command line tools I was in a training provider's program and you should have heard the complaining and bitching about "having" to learn to use a command line tool. You would have thought people were being asked to go shoot their next door neighbor. The question that flowed the most freely was "Are we really going to be tested on these things?".

 

In fairness are these microsoft software errors?
Rule 1 in IT diagnostics, determine whether its a software or hardware error, then use the tools to solve whichever it is, this is covered in A+.

Id imagine if you were at a certain level whithin a company then these sort of issues would be solvable because you would need experience to get to the level to solve these issues.

If we take the server malfunction for instance we have event viewer to check to see whether its a software issue, if it turns out to be a (hardware) raid array failiure, then the raid software would bring up warnings (and assuming it is setup correctly) would notify the relevant people to fix the issue.

And for "protocol breakdown", for instance (and id imagine its pc protocol, not routing or whatever you mean) you can ping 127.0.0.1 to check whether the TCP/IP stack is working properly, and then reinstall it, and if that fails then you dig deeper or escalate the issue.

I think the point i would like to make is that studying for exams/certs can be done in two ways.

The cram (ie braindumps or memorising the facts and some knowledge), or the studying method where you sit down and actually do the stuff, and read white papers, RFCs and all the other things you can do, even if its just to satisfy a lust for knowledge, this is more down to the individual.

The same could be said of certs, and of university, you do get out what you put in.