[ Fer-Martin ] (Re)invent your life every day

Hi everyone,

I have been thinking lately how important -or not- is it to hold an IT certification in this industry. Most IT profesionals, at some point of their career, go through the debate of being or not certified and it can burst a few brain cells to come up with the right answer.

There is not a single correct answer for this question, but before making this investment of time and money, and to avoid bowing to the first cheap advise that lands on your mailbox, you should think about it carefully.

Too many Options.

There is a huge market of certifications available for you (MCSE, CCIE, PMP, CCNA, 6Sigma, ITIL, etc) and they are all sponsored by really big multinationals. As the American psychologist Barry Schwartz would say in this case, “more is less“.

We are completely overloaded with options and that can become a very big problem. When we actually have to decide, we panic and we tend to choose the simplest option we can think of: we choose not to be in a position where we have to decide. Or what is worse, we choose someone else decide for us.

This is commonly known as the I-dont-know-what-to-do-with-my-life syndrom, and fortunately, it has a cure

Blindfolded Monkeys.

If we think about it, this problem comes down to basically the same structure to operating in the stock market. There are so many options available and we are dealing with so many different variables, that performing a really profesional analysis or picking any stock/certification randomly would make no actual difference at the end.

The Princeton Economist Burton Malkiel stated on his famous investment book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that a “blindfolded monkey throwing darts on a newspaper would have as much luck selecting a good portfolio as a profesional”, and he might have not been far from the truth for both cases.

I’m sure a blindfolded monkey, throwing darts to a “certifications list” could have the same chances of picking the right certification for you. And this is just because on a list of “10 things you can do to take off with your profesional career”, probably a certification is the last one to add value.

Define your goals.

You want to learn some technology? Ok, that’s a good goal. I honestly think that almost no one would ever pay such a big ammount of money just to learn some technology (unless you have enough money not to care where you spend it).

If you really just want to learn and master some technology, you might as well use that energy (or money) to put yourself in a position where you can actually work and gain experience with that technology. Certifications are certainly not the best path for learning, they are a way to achieve something else.

Ok, so if it is not about learning, what are we really looking for? In my opinion is something else: we are looking for a way to earn credibility. We should not foul ourselves in thinking otherwise. What we want is basically to prove to someone who doesn’t know us, that we are good enough to do some job. Think about this for a second, would you get certified to prove that you can master certain technology to someone you already know?

Let’s imagine for a second that I’m right, and that your goal is actually to increase your credibility (and probably your visibility). Then we are facing a different problem, and other solutions may come to the table. There are different ways of earning credibility; You can earn it by your experience and knowledge; or it can be transferred from someone with established credibility.

In my opinion, you won’t increase exponentialy your experience/knowhow by holding a certain certification, and only in some specific environments they can give you some credibility. If what you are looking for is credibility, you should start worrying about things like: how you present yourself, what kind of questions you ask, how well can you understand a problem or how fast/reliable can you implement a solution. There are no real shortcuts out there.

Having a paper that says ABCD Certified doesn’t prove any of this. Its like a driving license, it only showed that one day, on a certain road and during 10 minutes, you did the minimum to be a driver. Doesn’t it?

Are certifications a bad idea? Hell no! It is a great source of income for multinationals, as well as a way to prevent competition to enter a certain market. Besides that I think are not better than a book, a laptop and a good friend to ask questions