[Linux-aus] LA Certification

[Paul Gear]

On 4/7/23 20:17, Adam Nielsen via linux-aus wrote:
>>> This matches my own experience too.  I presume a lot of certifications
>>> focus on memorising things rather than applying knowledge, because
>>> people with a lot of certs often seem to struggle to come up with a
>>> solution for a problem.  If you tell them the solution they can usually
>>> implement it no problem, but you often have to hold their hand a bit
>>> while you're trying to work out what the solution might look like.
>> Speaking as someone who is FLOSS at heart but has a long list of vendor
>> certs, this makes me sad.
>>
>> I get vendor certs because my current and previous employer both highly
>> value them, and they make them free for staff to take. Most of the ones
>> I've taken (largely AWS & Azure) are little more than logic tests and as
>> long as you have a general idea about the product's capabilities and are
>> a competent reader and logical thinker, they aren't difficult.
> I suppose I should qualify that by saying the roles I have been
> involved in filling are more devops style, where you have to be part
> solution architect, part sysadmin, and part programmer.  This means you
> have to make decisions based on a series of tradeoffs and competing
> goals.


The DevOps consulting space is exactly where I would expect someone to 
end up with a lot of certs, specifically because they've been part of 
that trade-off-based decision making process on a number of different 
projects with a number of different technologies.


> ...
> Of course if you're already a good problem solver then the certs will
> teach you useful skills - no argument there - but the issue is if an
> employer is looking at two job applications, both of which list the
> same cert, how does one know which person is the good problem solver
> who can work with minimal supervision, and which person will need
> frequent guidance?


In my experience, certs don't teach you the skills; they are merely 
validations of your existing skills.  If you come to study for a cert 
with no prior experience with the technology, you should learn some 
skills as you study, but but if you're already a good problem solver, 
they probably won't teach you much at all. As such, on a job application 
they don't really mean that much as an indicator, either positive or 
negative.  (It's that latter part that made me wade into this thread - 
the idea that they might somehow be seen as a contra-indicator or 
antipattern for a job applicant is rather troubling.)


>    Most people just stick the cert's acronym on their
> CV and call it job done, with no explanation of what it is or how they
> used those skills to make themselves more productive, leaving the
> employer to wonder why they bothered listing it at all.


I can only speak from my experience here, but my current employer highly 
values certs because we are an AWS partner, and must maintain a certain 
number of certifications to maintain our partner status.  I'd expect 
that's true for Microsoft, Cisco, and Red Hat partners as well, but I'm 
only guessing there.

Paul