Increase Your Paycheck: Get Certified!

There has always been a huge debate in the computer field over the value of education. This debate is probably more prevalent in this field than most others because of the number of people who are self taught or just plain know what they are doing. It's a strange field, because you can have some seventeen year old kid still in high school making 80 thousand a year as a consultant because he's just that good at assembly language code. And yet the guy with the bachelor's degree is only making 50 thousand. Go figure.

The Pace of Change

However, in our careers in the computer field, most of us are faced at one time or another with a decision. Do we further our education? And if so, what's the best way to do that? One difficulty is that most competent people in this field are so damn busy that they don't even have time to sleep right, much less go back to school. Actually, many of us got into computers in the first place because we hated school. Working on a computer program or designing a web site was an escape from that hated hell hole called college (at least that's the way it was with me).

Well, if you put the emotion aside and think rationally, it's really not a difficult question to answer. I know that I still blame most of my problems on my high school and college professors, but that's really not relevant, is it?

What's important is the fact that the computer industry is moving so fast that the technology changes totally every two or three years. And that's astounding when you think that accounting hasn't changed in concept in thousands of years! Medicine moves at a snails pace compared to the standard release schedule of new processors from Intel. Even though the 40 million lines of code in Windows 2000 seemed to never get finished, that's minor compared with the decades of research and testing that need to go into the release of each and every drug!

It's this speed that makes further education not optional. Yeah, you might be the most incredible Fortran programmer in the world today, but in a year Fortran might be totally replaced by something else. I've seen this happen over and over and over. Excellent people making incredible salaries find themselves having difficulty getting jobs because their skills are no longer needed ... or are so outdated that nobody does that anymore.

But wait a minute ... college takes years and years. I mean people spend five or six or even seven years just going through college! And that's full time! How can a professional who has to earn a living fifty hours a week or more find time to go to college???

From an Employers Perspective

There's another factor involved in all of this, and that's the employer. Think about it. Let's say you are a manager and you've just put out an ad for a new senior system manager position, Windows NT experience needed, and so on. After you get back the hundred or so resumes, how do you determine who is best qualified? You could try references, but if you've done that you know how hard it is, with lawsuits and all, to get any information out of previous employers. And you could look at the work that the person has done, but you can be sure he's picked his best work, not his normal quality. Anyway, that helps a little with programming and HTML coding jobs, but what about that system manager position? How do you look at his previous work?

You could ask lots of questions about technical stuff, and you could have your technical people interview the person. But still, it's difficult to come up with the right questions during an interview, and it's only an hour long anyway.

What do you look at? How is a manager to know?

Ah, there is an answer, and that's called certification! If you are a system manager you could get an MCSE, which basically indicates that you know how to manage a set of Microsoft products and you've proven it by passing some tests. You could go even further and get your MCSE+I, which translates to "you are one of the elite". An active Microsoft Certification like this means you are current in the technology as you must keep testing year after year on new products in order to keep your certification.

If you add to that some broader certifications such as Hycurve, CIW, A+ and Network+, you've got your well-rounded computer or internet education.

But what about those people who say "Any jerk with $500 can get a CNE, with little effort. The only people who have problems with those tests are managers and old Fortran programmers." Well, what can you say? Personally, I wouldn't even bother to debate with these guys, as they have already made up their minds. Perhaps they are so smart that they don't need an education?

But for the rest of us, well, the certifications are difficult. To honestly pass the MCSE or MCSE+I exams is very challenging. I am an employer, and I would have tremendous instant respect for anyone who has passed the MCSE+I. This is a very tough series of exams!