Cool Beans

People in the know (read: actually doing good work) are quick to dismiss professional certifications. I've even heard it said that those who don't do real work, certify. And perhaps this has reached HR ears where it's tougher to prove your experience through certification credentials alone.

I can understand the points that naysayers raise. Certifications seem duplicitous— and look to be very good business for certifying bodies and technology vendors alike. I mean if I were a firewall manufacturer, or created an operating system, sure... I'd love for people to pay me to call themselves experts and make lots of money fixing problems caused by my stuff.

But sadly, the software industry (and high-tech industry in general) is about as unregulated as commercial banks of the new millennium, if not worse. Coders are not at all like skyscraper architects or civil engineers where a great deal of rigor, statutes, and inspection go into what we construct. There are valiant and organized efforts to make ours a true engineering field, but let's face it, it's still very much the wild west when it comes to writing code or implementing an information security plan.

Continued professional education.

It is easy to get caught in a rut, working on the same things, solving many [similar] problems, so much so that it loses its meaning and fervor. One of the aspects of professional certifications like those of SANS GIAC, ISC2 certs, and even vendor certs like SCJP or CCNA is that they expire. In order to prevent expiry you typically either have to prep for and re-take the exam (that's lame), or you need to prove your continued professional education in the field. At first I thought earning CPE credits for re-certification would be a burden, a hassle. But it turns out it's led to many a big discovery and sometimes even fun. CPEs provide that reason to go for it, to expand. Without this push, it is easy to settle into specialized fields and acquire a lot of the same domain knowledge; never venturing to new areas or keeping apprised of industry developments.

Certifications provide a baseline.

This benefit is not as exciting for me, but important for communication with industry peers. If we're all talking in different dialects, it's hard to build a Tower of Babel. Like it or not, there is no standard way of knowing that someone's on the same page as quickly as a third-party vouching for said person. While certs are not a substitute for experience and skill, it's a great way to know we can at least discuss familiar topics like design patterns, field vocabulary, and basic concepts.

Certification catches you up.

Some of us did not have the privilege of going to school for Computer Science. Perhaps we jumped in during the formative years of worldwide networks and got stuck in a QA job for the majority of it. Maybe we're highly specialized in legacy systems. Or maybe we just find ourselves in utterly new territory (often with the very same problems we faced with old territory). These days I get a lot of interaction with undergraduate students who can run circles around me with what they're taking in class. And I've even read that understanding the science of what we do should be enforced educationally and not later on-the-job.¹ Unfortunately, there are a lot of "older" folk who didn't get to formally study any of a myriad IT concepts in school; and need to get good at this rapidly growing technology in a non-arbitrary way. Certification is one way to catch up, and in an organized manner. It might not garner the techie respect of four to eight years of compiler design and operating systems classes, but some training is better than nothin'-but-google. 

A lot on forum comments about professional certification say they are "useless" and mere "résumé padding." Comments like these can come from those who know next to nothing about the cert, or people who studied, worked hard, got the selfsame cert, and then came to realize that all the fame and glory they visualized can be attained by anybody else who studies and works hard. Dreams of differentiation are shattered as the cert gains popularity. Of course, there are also the computer science elites who don't even need to consider certification because they're already shaping the industry on a daily basis. But purists and elitists who poo-poo certified professionals only show that they still haven't grown up beyond their egos.

If motivations for getting certified are only to stamp the resume and look better to others, just quit now. But if the core motivation is to expand capabilities, to get on the same page as other professionals, and provide a path for continued education, then the returns on investment could be immense.