Thursday, December 07, 2006

Catching up: IT Certifications

It has been a while -- avery long while -- since I have blogged. Shame on me! Actually, I have written lots of "stuff" but it never made it to the blog. So here are a few of them:

To many of us in the IT world, the concept of certifications invoques a mix of feelings and opinions. Some people completely dismiss the whole thing as worthless, and some continuously add certifications to an already lengthy list. But do these certifications really matter? Some say no, some yes -- I say it depends. Certifications for the sake of themselves are worthless -- there are too many "paper MCSEs" out there to prove the point. Certifications in addition to real-life experience certainly can have value. But the certification itself must reflect real life in order for it to be worthy of the time and expense it requires. Therein lies the problem -- real life in the IT world is too complex to be similarly experienced by thousands of candidates. In order to bring things to a common point, certification exams sometimes have to bring their scope to the least common denominator that they can establish from their experience. And thus the testing can be significantly diluted and lose its value. I suggest a better system: revive the apprenticeship concept. Only through a healthy mixture of experience, theory and time can we prepare future IT generations to do quality work with better efficiency.

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