Not sure how to take it since you explicit pointed out nothing personally against me, yet that people with a lot of certs are hoarders!?
I too think many certs are a bunch of crap, but never the less, they do show retained knowledge just as a clep or dsst does. FWIW I am a director level person in a $22B corporation and have 20+ years in IT. I only list my certs on resumes to show that I have requisite knowledge in various areas. But I have the experience to back up every single one of my certs, on projects that most IT people can only dream of. I have been part of startups that sold for more than $1B and sat right next to some of the biggest names working on problems that many "IT" people take for granted because it's just built in now. Some of my environments have had thousands of physical servers, and one environment had 250K users! The current environment only has about 25K users, but has 25PB of storage that grows at 1PB a quarter, almost 2K x86 servers with almost 13K virtual servers, not including any of my unix or mainframe servers, and with applications that need to beat 5-9's of uptime but still have near ZERO (less than 1 second) rpo and rto, in case it happens to go offline.
So this is where I will agree with you and bash certs, then I will revisit why some are worthy. Sorry but I am about to really offend a lot of people. CCIE, probably the hardest cert in all of IT to get, and if I remember, I don't think there have ever been more than 30,000 of them at one time, but no ACE credit from what I have seen. Plus, the dozen or so that I know are some of the smartest damn people ever! Also as person in a hiring position, I too look at a load of certifications on a resume with skepticism, but then during the interview I see what they know, I don't eliminate them for the sake of having too many certs. This is where I am sorry for offending, but the majority of people with a Microsoft cert on their resume, have done nothing to backup the cert with experience. And yet MS certs are vendor specific, as I think you put it, the easiest to get college credit for, and 1M plus people have one?! Go figure.
Now considering that I have unix certs from three different manufacturers, and know two more, its safe to say I know unix well beyond what a college course would teach me. Also I obtained instructor status from one manufacturer on many topics which include shell programming, perl programming, etc.. Wouldn't it prove that if I can teach it to others, it might be just a bit beyond a basic college class? The BCFP I listed, to this day is one of the hardest exams I can recall, simply because the class I took to obtain the knowledge is on par with any data communications class I think is out there. And went well beyond my Air Force Electronics classes on digital communications. Please feel free to search out the ENDL Publications "The Fibre Channel Bench Reference" that was required reading material. We are talking good old fashion OSI style encoding and decoding of fibre channel frames, pay particular attention to page 21, referencing the 1996 edition I have, it shows the eye and jitter references we needed to troubleshoot the early days of FC using our finisar fc analyzers for something a goofy as an gbic copper to fiber conversion timing issue!
But nah.. why consider that worthy of any college credit, I mean hell it's only on par with senior year if not graduate level electronics engineering and computer science courses. I went on to use the foundational knowledge that cert provided me, to help keep me relevant to even the most recent 16Gbps FC that is available. It helped me setup some SCI based massive cluster system, it even helped me get selected to go to the IBM Blue Gene labs in Minnesota, to build the prototype Infiniband storage system that went into the 55PB lustre filesystem that Lawrence livermore used to build the Sequoia supercomputer. And I don't even want to start on if anyone cares to debate microprocessor or microcontroller architectures, some of which I learned through certs, and some from working with intel designers as well as members of the DEC Alpha processor designers. But again why would any of this be worthy of credit!?
However, my question if you will read back to my original post, was asking for people who had done prior learning assessments, and if it would be considered part of the evidence of knowledge required? Not your opinion on what you thought of certifications and their place in a "broad horizon of knowledge" of a college degree.
So nothing against you back, but I think I will stick to my own advice and use certs they way I have always used them. Particularly considering that I already make over $250K a year, leaving out my $15K of stock and 30 days a year of vacation.
I too think many certs are a bunch of crap, but never the less, they do show retained knowledge just as a clep or dsst does. FWIW I am a director level person in a $22B corporation and have 20+ years in IT. I only list my certs on resumes to show that I have requisite knowledge in various areas. But I have the experience to back up every single one of my certs, on projects that most IT people can only dream of. I have been part of startups that sold for more than $1B and sat right next to some of the biggest names working on problems that many "IT" people take for granted because it's just built in now. Some of my environments have had thousands of physical servers, and one environment had 250K users! The current environment only has about 25K users, but has 25PB of storage that grows at 1PB a quarter, almost 2K x86 servers with almost 13K virtual servers, not including any of my unix or mainframe servers, and with applications that need to beat 5-9's of uptime but still have near ZERO (less than 1 second) rpo and rto, in case it happens to go offline.
So this is where I will agree with you and bash certs, then I will revisit why some are worthy. Sorry but I am about to really offend a lot of people. CCIE, probably the hardest cert in all of IT to get, and if I remember, I don't think there have ever been more than 30,000 of them at one time, but no ACE credit from what I have seen. Plus, the dozen or so that I know are some of the smartest damn people ever! Also as person in a hiring position, I too look at a load of certifications on a resume with skepticism, but then during the interview I see what they know, I don't eliminate them for the sake of having too many certs. This is where I am sorry for offending, but the majority of people with a Microsoft cert on their resume, have done nothing to backup the cert with experience. And yet MS certs are vendor specific, as I think you put it, the easiest to get college credit for, and 1M plus people have one?! Go figure.
Now considering that I have unix certs from three different manufacturers, and know two more, its safe to say I know unix well beyond what a college course would teach me. Also I obtained instructor status from one manufacturer on many topics which include shell programming, perl programming, etc.. Wouldn't it prove that if I can teach it to others, it might be just a bit beyond a basic college class? The BCFP I listed, to this day is one of the hardest exams I can recall, simply because the class I took to obtain the knowledge is on par with any data communications class I think is out there. And went well beyond my Air Force Electronics classes on digital communications. Please feel free to search out the ENDL Publications "The Fibre Channel Bench Reference" that was required reading material. We are talking good old fashion OSI style encoding and decoding of fibre channel frames, pay particular attention to page 21, referencing the 1996 edition I have, it shows the eye and jitter references we needed to troubleshoot the early days of FC using our finisar fc analyzers for something a goofy as an gbic copper to fiber conversion timing issue!
But nah.. why consider that worthy of any college credit, I mean hell it's only on par with senior year if not graduate level electronics engineering and computer science courses. I went on to use the foundational knowledge that cert provided me, to help keep me relevant to even the most recent 16Gbps FC that is available. It helped me setup some SCI based massive cluster system, it even helped me get selected to go to the IBM Blue Gene labs in Minnesota, to build the prototype Infiniband storage system that went into the 55PB lustre filesystem that Lawrence livermore used to build the Sequoia supercomputer. And I don't even want to start on if anyone cares to debate microprocessor or microcontroller architectures, some of which I learned through certs, and some from working with intel designers as well as members of the DEC Alpha processor designers. But again why would any of this be worthy of credit!?
However, my question if you will read back to my original post, was asking for people who had done prior learning assessments, and if it would be considered part of the evidence of knowledge required? Not your opinion on what you thought of certifications and their place in a "broad horizon of knowledge" of a college degree.
So nothing against you back, but I think I will stick to my own advice and use certs they way I have always used them. Particularly considering that I already make over $250K a year, leaving out my $15K of stock and 30 days a year of vacation.
Dude Wrote:Why would they be? Most all certs you listed are very specific vendor based certs, they are essentially the exact opposite of what higher education is supposed to be about (broad horizon of knowledge).
FWIW, I am in IT, and I have hired for IT positions; I am always weary of folks who have 40375934594 certs on their resume. To me this always screams that the person is a cert hoarder but doesn't actually have any in-depth knowledge about a specific topic. Nothing against you personally, but my advice is to leave all the certs that are not relevant to a specific job you are applying for off of your resume. For example, unless you are sure that the company you are applying to is running Sun hardware I'd leave those certs off and potentially mention it during the interview.
DSST- General Anthropology - 52, Intro to Computer - 469, Technical Writing - 54, DSST Ethics in America - 59 (1996),
CLEP- Sociology -54, College Math - 550(1996), CLEP Principles of Management - 60 (1996)
Aleks Beg Alg,
CLEP- Sociology -54, College Math - 550(1996), CLEP Principles of Management - 60 (1996)
Aleks Beg Alg,
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