Richard Walker

So I have an option to undergo a few new certifications.

I have a shortlist (of vendors, at least): Cisco, RedHat, Oracle, Novell. Not necessarily in that order.

I think one thing I’ve discovered is that being the jack-of-all-trades type is extremely handy because you’re so hireable for anybody who touches upon any area of technology you happen to be savvy in. One thing I’m learning through talking to people however is that specialists tend to earn a lot more, even if finding the work they’re after is a little trickier and they have to think on their feet a lot more to move (geographically, if necessary) where the money is.

However the other area in which certification is handy is when you have someone like me, jack-of-all-trades etc who has earned their skills through live-fire exercise, so to speak; usually dropped in the deep end with something or faced with a challenge that threatens to unseat their personal lives through commitment to getting the job done.

I’m talking about knowledge holes. Gaping voids, in some cases.

Being fire-baptised in IT is a great thing because it teaches you comprehension, complex reasoning, problem solving and any number of other valuable skills. All in all, if it were up to me, if you presented me with a) a die-hard hobbyist who’d been playing with computers since the age of 12, with no tertiary education and who’d hopped from one work experience placement to another, perhaps putting in a little grunt time at a university or ISP or their dad’s company, and who’d taught themselves the skills they deemed useful, or b) a straight-7′s computer science student….. in an ideal world, I’d hire both, but if I had to choose, it would be an extremely difficult choice, and most likely contingent upon Mr/Ms Straight 7′s past in the field, i.e. did he/she take to computers early on out of genuine passion, or did they simply fit into the groove after leaving school and do very well.

Experience trumps education. And while that may seem like a very obtuse and foolish view, remember that experience IS education. It’s just a different form of education….. it’s education learned through exposure and practical application rather than theory, study and more theory.

Example: I have absolutely no idea what 1st, or 2nd, or 3rd, or 4th “normal form” is if I were faced with such a question on an exam. But I’d put money on the fact that I can design and implement a database much better than Mr Straight 7′s, because I’ve had real exposure to such problems. And upon examination, it would be perfectly apparent that my design was well thought out, thoroughly normalised and generally in very good shape.

Now, I’m not suggesting a university education is worthless, or even simply unecessary… but where IT managers and the like need to be careful is in simply moving someone’s resume to the top of the pile because they finished first in their class.

Experience is gold. Education makes a great foundation and an even better supplement after the fact, and if you can combine the two, you are dynamite and damn near unstoppable.

But I digress (on a monumental scale). The reason for my desire to attain more certification is to plug knowledge gaps…. I’m a good man in a storm, I let nothing stand between me and ultimate success when it comes to solving technology problems, but there is ground I haven’t covered. I can kick ass in my field and suddenly be left treading water and eventually drowning because there’s just one little area I’m completely unexposed to, and in which I’m completely uneducated.

This is where certification fits in: most people like me can absolutely cream the certification path/uni course of choice, because real world experience primes you to nail the comprehension, complex reasoning and problem solving tasks that you may face during the process, and leave you to simply soak up the knowledge and apply it creatively, pragmatically and most importantly, with an eye for real-world application.

Moral of the story: if you’ve been in the game a couple of years, and are a pro at getting the job done in a half dozen different disciplines, there could not possibly be a better time to pick a specialisation and get certified. By the time your certification is done, you’ve already got several years applicable experience under your belt and can start punching well above your weight straight away.