Certification Musings

[virtualjack]

While between jobs, I'm looking at the certification racket.

From the management side, there is an ITIL foundation certification. That particular certification doesn't seem expensive. Exam ~$200 and bootcamp style class for ~$500.

From the technical side, there are the RHCSA and RHCE certifications. The classes are a major gouge. The exams themselves are $400 each. I have the knowledge but there are a few areas I could brush up on. Books are about $40 but instruction ranges into the $3k-$7k range easy. That is why it is a racket.

Now a RHCA seems to be a nice certification but it takes work to get there. It requires an RHCE and about 5 other exams. Naturally it represents brainwashing the RedHat way but it does show the technical creds on building an infrastructure.

Anyone have thoughts on this one.

Comments

ITIL and Others

[bluepoppycat]

Alex got himself stuck in the certification trap - he thought he'd update his Mircosoft Network administration one - not sure which level - but it's a big beast - he has been working from course books (rather than attending a course which was ££££), he did the course-work, built a network in his house room (6 PC's and a printer), installed and testing lots of stuff - do really discover that a) it drove him crazy and he didn't really want a job that this qualification would relate to b) he got into a procrastination loop because he wasn't enjoying it.

This is the problem with doing it via course books only - it can lead to to procrastination

He's now doing the quickie ITIL, and going through the course books, he knows a great deal of the info already.

Like a lot of these things - it's something that helps tick the boxes - but not much else. It only helps if you have the experience to back in up IMO

Re: ITIL and Others

[virtualjack]

Spoke to a recruiter at a company today. The certificates are useful for a (consulting/outsourcing) company to market you to their customers. So I'll probably do the quickie ITIL and also the basic RHCSA/RHCE. I'm not going to tackle anything outside of what I pretty much already know at this time.