Certification or College degrees?

Wed May 22 23:27:42 UTC 2002

In a message written on Wed, May 22, 2002 at 06:37:35PM -0400, Nigel Clarke wrote:
> Why would you devote your career to learning a vendor's 
> command line or IOS? 

Selling your soul to a vendor is not always a bad decision.  It
happens in all industries as well.  If the vendor is popular, there
will always be people willing to pay for detailed experience with
that vendor, or for esoteric knowledge about that vendor.

> Cisco has done an excellent job @ brainwashing the IT 
> community. The have (unfortunately) set the standard for 
> "Network Engineers". 

I'm biased, see .sig, but having been through the process, and seen
what other vendors (eg, Microsoft, Novell) do with their programs
I do believe that Cisco wants their certifications to mean something.
No, that doesn't mean everyone who is certified is an expert.  It
does mean the odds that someone with a Cisco certification knows
something are probably an order of magnitude better than a Microsoft
certified person.

> What do you think is more respected, a masters degree in 
> Networking Engineering or a CCIE. In most 
> circles it would be the latter. 

What I really want to address is that you don't get something like
a CCIE for the "respect".  Believe me, I don't get any for having
it.  When I got it, I was a consultant.  The reality was if I had
a CCIE my employer could bill me at a significantly higher rate,
some of which they passed on to me.  Why did people pay these rates?
The answer was simple, they had better odds of getting someone
good.  These people would go through 4-5 "Network Engineers", get
frustrated because they really and truly didn't know anything,
they would then pay for a CCIE and, more often than not, be happy.

I really don't think Cisco is better or worse than other industries.
Are all ASE Certified Master Mechanics people you want working on
your car?  No.  Are there some non-certified mechanics who could
run circles around the certified ones?  Of course.  That said, your
odds are much better that your car will run again if you have a
certified mechanic.

Many have said business is simply risk management, and certifications
are a way of managing that risk.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org