One-Trick-Pony vs. Multi-Vendor-Skills

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What are you thoughts on this?

I know a lot of people who have only set out and takin on Microsoft skills and certifications and put more weight on lets say an MCSE rather than lets say an MCSA & Linux & Cisco...

I think that my thoughts may come across a little bias as I studied and got my MCSA, Linux+ and CCNA, however I wouldn't be working in the position I am now if I didn't have these skills.

I know that my boss wouldn't employ anyone with an MCSE and with no commercial experience AND for the fact that we're running MS and Red Hat... The MCSE Electives are useless as we don't run a the MS backend products, such as:

SQL - Oracle
Exchange - Send Mail
Proxy - Squid
IIS - Apache

Do you think some people get into IT and not truely understand what employers are looking for?

 

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I think you really only get to know what employers are looking for once you have the commercial experience. Even then every employer is different.

When you took your certs were you specifically targetting companies which had the knid of environment you are working in now or were you getting as broad a range of skills as possible in the hope of being attractive to as wide a range of employers as possible? There are many completely MS shops out there where the Linux+ would have done you no good, though I think the CCNA will serve you well whatever environment you're in.

Phil

 

I agree with Phil
every environment is different, those with linux systems will definatly look for staff with a linux certification, and not all of those will go for someone with a cert and no experiance, the boats just the same as the windows stuff
if you had a RHCE but no microsoft stuff, and all the clients were XP, theres a chance you wouldnt get hired, because although your a linux top dog, your windows skills would be non existant

i think its a careful balance, the majority of sites are predomenantly MS houses, and hence why MS skills are more readily available in the industry, that does mean the few that do use other systems tend to pay better to find the qualified people, as they have to

I dont have any linux certs, but i have a few years experiance and have even worked in a pure linux server environment, I also have Lotus and HP qualifications, lotus quals are useless unless the place runs notes, just as exchange cers are useless if the place runs lotus

again, every place is different, and you cant really tailor your certs to a company, find a company thats looking for what you can offer, thats the best position to be in, and hte more you can offer, the easier it will be to find a position

 

Nicely put Phoenix. I think it comes down to a personal choice too. Some people are interested in all areas of IT and some only concentrate on one area.

I think it's more likely that the people themselves don't know what they're looking for. For most people MS is the only one that counts as it's the only system they've used, so they only do MS certs.

 

I guess it's a case of having to look at what employers are after, but then you don't want to waste money getting a cert that you'll never use.

I suppose the best thing to do is to keep your options open, and respond to demand.

Myself, I'm looking to be multi-vendor.