Vendor independent certifications?

[Tom Buskey]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 10:01 AM, Brian St. Pierre <brian at bstpierre.org>wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:32 AM, Mike <mikebw at colossus.bilow.com> wrote:
> > A friend of mine is looking for a career change and asks what sort of
> > vendor independent certifications (that is, not another college degree)
> > would help them get in the door in programming, web design, or system
> > administration? She is not mainly asking about actual education, but
> > rather how to prove knowledge in such a way that would convince
>            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> > prospective employers.
>
>
> As far as programming or web design goes, I don't put much stock in
> any kind of certification. I'd be far less likely to want to hire
> someone based on a certificate than I would be based on demonstrable
> experience. Also, "knowledge" is fleeting: stuff that I knew 5, 10, or
> 15 years ago is useless today. Better to be able to prove that you're
> smart and capable of learning things quickly.
>
>
I'm a sysadmin and have hired some in the past.  In the dot com era, we
would sort resumes by "lots of certs" and experience.  Then we looked at
the resumes with experience.  The certs got looked at if we couldn't find
experience, but we never did.

I always ask what people do at home with computers.  Most people nowadays
have them and an internet connection.  There is no excuse (other then time)
for not learning about free software.  Most of the Microsoft stuff is
available for evaluation (learn about AD, etc).  You can run VirtualBox or
VMware ESXi to run systems in VM if your computer is more recent.

Being curious and service oriented is important.  One of the best service
desk techs I saw didn't know computers when he started.  He was a
troubleshooter for the gas company.  Within 2 years he was figuring out how
to upgrade an ATM network w/o downtime when the engineers said it would
take shutting down everything & having it back up 18 months later.
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