How rare are IT certifications?

[child of wonder]

Microsoft certs are valid if you are a domain or exchange admin (which most orgs need). Aside from that, if you are a load balancer guy, virtualization admin, or network admin...it wouldn't hurt to have certs or at least attend training occasionally from F5, VMware, Citrix, and Cisco.

No need to actually have the certificate if you have an understanding of the product and know how to RTFM.

No offense but I work with dozens of companies a year to assist them with VMware, EMC, Cisco, etc. and because the admins either don't bother to learn or have the above attitude I see so many poorly architected and maintained environments it astounds me that this country even continues to function with so many IT departments poised for a major, crippling outage. Even some Fortune 500 companies are not exempt from this.

Low level certs where braindumps are readily available mean little IMO, but when you start getting up into the high level stuff (CCIE, VCDX, MVP, etc.) they are immensely valuable especially if one wishes to become a consultant or work for a vendor.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

No offense but I work with dozens of companies a year to assist them with VMware, EMC, Cisco, etc. and because the admins either don't bother to learn or have the above attitude I see so many poorly architected and maintained environments it astounds me that this country even continues to function with so many IT departments poised for a major, crippling outage. Even some Fortune 500 companies are not exempt from this.

Low level certs where braindumps are readily available mean little IMO, but when you start getting up into the high level stuff (CCIE, VCDX, MVP, etc.) they are immensely valuable especially if one wishes to become a consultant or work for a vendor.

Certs don't make you an IT ace, however. They are definitely necessary for a consulting position but most corporate IT departments don't value them very much. I've seen my share of highly certified individuals who were far below me technically and I had to help with basic things.

Also, another point -- let's not confuse the state of a company's IT infrastructure with the skill level of the staff because there isn't necessarily a correlation. Many companies don't have the money (or won't spend the money) on redundancy, infrastructure upgrades, staffing, etc, and as a result, the infrastructure won't be ideal. Staff is therefore forced to do the best they can with the resources given to them. As I often tell consultants here when they walk in the door -- you will definitely find things that need improvement or even "fixed," but these things didn't necessarily get in that state out of ignorance; oftentimes, proposals were made to do the right thing and were shot down so we had to make do with what we had.

And don't even get me started on lack of DR preparedness. I could spend hours on that topic alone.

 

[child of wonder]

Certs don't make you an IT ace, however. They are definitely necessary for a consulting position but most corporate IT departments don't value them very much. I've seen my share of highly certified individuals who were far below me technically and I had to help with basic things.

Also, another point -- let's not confuse the state of a company's IT infrastructure with the skill level of the staff because there isn't necessarily a correlation. Many companies don't have the money (or won't spend the money) on redundancy, infrastructure upgrades, staffing, etc, and as a result, the infrastructure won't be ideal. Staff is therefore forced to do the best they can with the resources given to them. As I often tell consultants here when they walk in the door -- you will definitely find things that need improvement or even "fixed," but these things didn't necessarily get in that state out of ignorance; oftentimes, proposals were made to do the right thing and were shot down so we had to make do with what we had.

And don't even get me started on lack of DR preparedness. I could spend hours on that topic alone.

I agree 100%. Management is also to blame for the poor state of many IT shops but there are a good deal of IT staff that don't know what they're doing either. Worse still, there are many that think they know what they're doing when they really don't. Sometimes the poor technical level of the staff is also a management failure when many companies don't know what to look for in IT candidates and are quick to slap on titles with "Senior" or "Level II/III" to people that haven't really earned it, not to mention the substandard pay they want to offer to real, qualified IT pros.

Certs don't guarantee someone knows what they're doing either. Even as a consultant, I have co-workers that have certification X but know very little about X. Unfortunately, brain dumps galore are available online. On the other hand, there are many certifications that require actual hands on work to prove one really knows their stuff like the VCAP, VCDX, RHCE, and more. Those are a very good barometer that someone is truly an expert in that technology.

 

[rsutoratosu]

I stop getting my mcse since college (nt3.5/4). I stop wasting money because at my 2nd job, the MCSE consultant that came by told us he used to be a chef a month ago.

Like im gonna let iron chef touch my servers