Vendor independent certifications?

[David Hardy]

What Jerry just said.

Working in IT on and off since 1984 and looking at, starting, and trying to
complete, several certification paths during that time, it was more or less
a fool's game.  No sooner did we come close to finishing a cert, in Windows
NT, for example, then Microsoft had a whole new cert process in place along
with a newer o.s.  (this was when a couple of iterations of my PHB manglers
forcibly kicked me out of the VMS world into Windows).   Same with the
other vendors, to varying degrees.   And of course we've all seen the paper
cert and braindump stuff by now and the unpredictability of what HR people
look for on resumes and applications.

That said, I would venture to guess that if somebody was just starting out
in IT and/or making a change to it as a possible career field;  I'd mention
that while I am not qualified to speak much about programming and
development stuff,  that networks are close to bedrock worldwide and having
a good solid grounding in that would be very desirable.  The CompTIA
Network + path would be a possibility, as a vendor-neutral cert, but I
would also mention that Cisco apparently runs on 80% of the world's
networks now, so maybe CCENT or CCNA, etc.

The 80% rule supposedly applies again to Linux, with Red Hat running on
that percentage of enterprise-level Linux systems, so maybe the RHCSA/RHCE.


Ordinarily I'd mention security as a foundation of IT learning, but I am
pretty cynical about that from years of cop work and then having to mess
with it before and currently at various gigs and discovering that it is
routinely ignored, dismissed, looked at exclusively as a cost, and treated
more or less contemptuously by PHB manglers and the higher-level execs and
suits.   Thankless, in other words.

Other than that, and obviously talking out my you-know-what as a fossil sys
admin and former BOFH, I would only say that if possible, get intern and
project experience and go to install-fests, meetings, LUGs, and get on
email lists, etc., etc.  Network and talk to people, ask for help, etc.


On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:

> In my experience, in the Unix/Linux marketplace for developers, I have
> not really seen where certifications are meaningful. Even in the area of
> system admins, things change so fast that certifications don't mean that
> much. There are some areas where certifications help, but that is in the
> Microsoft area. A lot of Windows admin people like to have all these
> certifications.
>
> As I alluded to above, IMHO, certifications tend to be living in the
> past. Things change so fast in our industry that by the time a
> certification qual is developed and made available, and people take it,
> things are already old and out of date.
>
> --
> Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
> Boston Linux and Unix
> PGP key id:3BC1EB90
> PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66  C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20120309/a03be1c1/attachment-0001.html