Microsoft reveals career-enhancing .PNG files Microsoft's ongoing efforts to make its certifications something that shows bosses how very clever you are have given us some new “Digital Badges”. As of this Friday, those of you holding a Redmondian Seal of Exam Passing Cleverness will be able to download badges like those depicted above (here for those of you on mobile …
Manufacturer-based qualifications tell people how good that person is with that particular manufacturer's tools. But those tools are ephemeral to say the least. If I wanted to collaborate with someone who had knowledge I would want to know how far that knowledge extends back in time, and how committed that person was to what they are promoting right now. How deep-seated that knowledge is, and the experience that goes with that knowledge.
It says nothing about the future. When that list becomes superseded, will those people still be recommending the 2016 product-list to their clients? Will anything on that product list still be available in five or six year's time? Looking at the list, what is the earliest product there? I don't think anything more than about five or six years at most.
Look at history. Take Silverlight for example. Where are all the Silverlight developers now? What are they recommending these days?
Couldn't agree more... the last vendor's course I did was Lotus Notes in 1999... it was a waste of time (the course) and I haven't used the skills it didn't teach me since...
the trouble I now have is that my CV spans 20+ odd years... Oddly, I suspect it puts people off...
"the trouble I now have is that my CV spans 20+ odd years... Oddly, I suspect it puts people off..."
Know what you mean - young HR idiots think you're going to tell them to get off your lawn.
One youngster (all certs and no experience) recently called me a "dinosaur" when he realised I started my career in the year he was born...
"Yeah, that's right. Big head, fat body, little arms - guess that makes me a T-Rex and way higher up the food chain than you !"
You are 100% correct on the vendor qualification. Hope, the vendor didn't make any changes or introduce anything new in their next release. If they do, you will have to send them for re-certification.
In the US, there is a high shortage of skilled techincal and engineering talent. Who does Dump think is going to fill the gap?
His undereducated supportersm who are unable to do basic math? Yep, they are going to write software for self propelled and GPS controlled weaponry!
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Between me and Affinity Designer I will soon have many badges, even for stuff that doesn't exist.
It's even better than the famous Most Ingratiating Blogger—, er, Most Valued Professional: everyone should get a Most Uncritical Groveler badge.
Seriously, though, product-centric qualifications have their value (if they're based on serious testing), but they can be a hindrance too. Very few of the companies who would trouble to employ somebody because they have a M$ secret decoder badge will also be single-ecosystem outfits, and as anybody who's done large-scale IT knows, the devil is in the gaps between systems. To paraphrase the other Clinton, when asked which part of IT really matters: "It's integration, stupid".
And the last thing you need on the team is some ninny who has quasi-religious enthusiasm for his supplier: blinkers just do not help. Give me a smart, experienced, versatile generalist every time.
I've said this before I am yet to see an individual with a certification from the likes of Microsoft or Citrix that can demonstrate a superior level of knowledge to an individual that's actually worked with the technology.
And funnily enough, the only time it ever seems to matter to a company is when their partner accreditation is up for imminent renewal and they realise they need x number of people a y level of certification.
Until and unless they can make the exams real world examples where the solutions don't revolved around using only vendor technology and / or the way the vendor want you to do it in a lab environment, they're just noise.
Put a CV in front of me and I'm far more interested in the kind of work, where and for whom and how long than someone with a list of certs so long it makes you wonder when they ever had time to actually do their job.
"I've said this before I am yet to see an individual with a certification from the likes of Microsoft or Citrix that can demonstrate a superior level of knowledge to an individual that's actually worked with the technology."
Actually sometimes the MCPs, MCSEs are worse, because you have to put MS Marketing Dept answers to pass, which not only conflict with real world common sense, but sometimes with MSDN/TechNet articles.
Very many of the "Official" MS exam ways of doing stuff are nuts.
IMO the MS exams (having passed four with high scores) are only of value to companies selling ONLY MS products picking MS friendly Sales people.
Some of the Cisco ones are a bit more useful.
" Until and unless they can make the exams real world examples where the solutions don't revolved around using only vendor technology and / or the way the vendor want you to do it in a lab environment, they're just noise."
Can't upvote that sentiment enough!
Acclaim was launched by Pearson a couple of years ago, and other organisations started using them long before Microsoft.
(ISC)2 signed up a few months back, so I've got one for my CISSP.
They're useful in that you can prove a certification you hold is current - IF the person at the other end knows how to check that the badge is genuine.
When I took my Oracle DBA certs about 5 years ago, having already done 13 years of actual real world work in the industry on Oracle systems, I studied the certification guides thoroughly to make sure I knew what I would need to know to pass. To be sure I found a company selling cert question papers, bought a couple and studied those too.
I arrived at the test centre, sat down and I got through 80 questions in about 8-9 minutes 'cos almost every question on the test was in the test papers I'd bought online! So the test proved absolutely nothing other than the fact that I was able to retain information and perform verbatim regurgitation.
While I was studying properly I wandered into a few forums, some shadier than others to find there were people who have something like 15 certs in Oracle, RedHat and Microsoft to their name, all they were doing was discussing the best place to buy up the latest copies of the actual exam questions and learning the Q&As off by heart, taking the tests and claiming they were qualified!
Sadly I've never trusted certs since I passed my Oracle ones back then as I know they're worthless as anyone can take the tests and pass simply by having a method to remember large numbers og Q&As.
Hmm, it may be a few years since I was RedHat certified, but at the time the RHCT/RHCE exams where 100% practical in a classrom (and an NDA to stop you spilling the beans). So in order to get the certification you had to prove you could walk the walk in a set timeframe with no notes, and also no interwebs connectivity either. Though I suppose a heads-up on what they may ask you to do would be somewhat advantageous.
From idle chit-chat I hear that the Cisco exams are similar. But from memory the stuff from Microsoft and Sun was all multi-choice type stuff, and much of it very academic on how to do stuff, rather than what you would do in real life.
Some years ago I spent a huge amount of time and effort, and my employer (bless 'em) spent shedloads of money, on getting various MS and ITIL certifications. The MS certification exams were a joke, all you really needed was a reasonable memory function, the ITIL exams we another thing all together, extremely hard coursework work and the exams were a nightmare. Anyway I passed them all - the ITIL ones to my surprise.
Looking back I think they were a waste of time and effort. The MS certifications didn't help me one iota in the real world. The ITIL certifications were of some limited benefit but not near the level that matched the considerable amount of time, effort and money that went into getting them.
If I had my time over again I would not bother with them.
Last time I looked, they didn't work properly with LinkedIn.
Still, you can get away with posting all sorts of stuff up there...
Relevant Skills
Team Building
I have various certs for MS, Citrix and other products. I don't want to do them as I consider them largely pointless and I find studying to memorise crap I am unlikely to ever use simply to pass a test annoying to say the least. I do them under protest when my employer needs them to retain partner status.
With most MS products now focusing heavily on powershell, there are a lot of questions on this. Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of Posh, but if I am doing something which has the potential to cause catastrophic damage to an environment, there is no way I am going to rely on memory. Even if I am 99.999% certain I know the correct syntax I am still going to look it up and test before I do it for real. Therefore the questions are totally unrealistic.
"You want to do something which could royally fuck up your AD. Which one of these commands should you blindly execute from memory."
Even worse though are the recent certs for Azure & Office 365. The products change on almost a weekly basis, so how are you supposed to prepare for an exam? I recently did an O365 exam and answers to some questions would not have been correct 3 months ago, but are correct now. Do I give the currently correct answer or was the exam drawn up 6 months ago?
The training course I took for this exam had a module on DirSync. This tool has now been replaced with Azure AD Connect. Learning an obsolete tool I will never use in anger just on the off chance the exam still has questions on it is hardly the best use of my time.
On the plus side, I passed.
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Really surprised that El Reg isn't in the loop about the open technical standard upon which these badges are based. It's called Open Badges (http://openbadges.org) and was developed by Mozilla. These badges are more than just a revenue generator. As the gap continues to grow between the general skills taught in schools and the specific skills needed for work (especially technical work), you'll start to see more and more badges used to demonstrate specific competencies. There's a great open source project out there which lets you play with the tech - Badgr (http://badgr.io).
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