Now, what do you think makes more money, a rigorous certificate program that many people fail despite paying, or a certificate that almost everyone passes? If the certificate grantor is really savvy, they will launch a media campaign warning consumers and employers never to trust anyone without the certificate!

This process confuses the public and adds a barrier to entry to new people, regardless of their capabilities.

PMP – Worth The Trouble

I’ve seen this turn into an adversarial relationship quite quickly with clients feeling like they’ve been nickled and dimed, and contractors feeling like they’ve been taken advantage of. Based on my education and experience, the only thing useful about PMI training vis a vis managing web projects is seeing it as a model of “what not to do”.

Maybe the question we should be asking is why are Web/IT workers are so skeptical of certifications? Who doesn’t check to see if their auto mechanic is ASE certified? That the woman taking care of your elderly mother is an RN? These are certifications same as a PMP, CISSP, or MCSE but we don’t question their worth or the people that hold them.

My experience has been that “PMP-types” managing web projects usually lead to an extremely high level of dissatisfaction by everyone involved (stakeholders and project team), whereas projects handled using one of the various agile approaches leads to much better results, faster, and for less money.

Your mileage may vary.

Where is he today? Most likely lost in the business world, because out here it is about being resourcefull. You have to know where to find information, then apply it. Certification exams mostly make you memorize syntax and language constructs, not their application.

If I want to know what the third parameter is for a given function, I look it up. The key is that I know the function exists and explore what I can do with it. I have been certified in languages in the past, but no longer view them with any regard. Past results and how you solved some tough problems mean more to me.

Being told what to do or how to do it is one thing, doing it and learning as you go is another. But it personally only applies to the type of company you are trying to get a job at.

Every time I think about a web developer splashing on a professional logo on their site, I think about all those crazy site awards and how they really mean nothing, except for the attention they got in that period of time the won (if it was real in the first place).

Take the CompTIA A+ certification, for example. I’ve got one, and I know that anyone who took the test between roughly 2002 and late 2007 (myself included) has a cert that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The test was so laughably horrible that it made the certification useless. But CompTIA came back and completely revamped the test to make it not just harder but also more relevant, and thus it can pretty much be trusted again.

But you also have to know what the certification means. Take the CCNA for example. (Yet again, I’ve got a CCNA and I’m working toward my CCNP.) Many people think that the CCNA implies that the person can come in and fix their network. This is a very, very bad and incorrect assumption. All a CCNA guarantees you is that the person has a decent working knowledge of basic networking with IP, and a similar level of knowledge for working with the Cisco IOS. It doesn’t mean anything else. It doesn’t mean that the person understands DNS, HTTP, or FTP. It means that the person will know what NAT is, and what the difference between a switch and a hub is, but not necessarily that they’ll be able do something like migrating a company from an IP block on one hosting provider to another.

Don’t get me started on the MS certifications. I’ve yet to meet a single MSCE that impressed me. But, again, I know the tests have gone up and down in quality over the years.

My last example, again from personal experience, is a ColdFusion Developer certification. These have improved in quality over the years from “I have enough knowledge of CF and web standards to be a decent web developer” to “I have almost guru-level CF and HTML/CSS skills, and probably pretty good JavaScript skills”. Even if a job wasn’t for CF but for some other web language, I’d still hire a CF-certified developer in a heartbeat, because I know they’d probably be able to jump in and get working without asking me dumb questions like “why can I View Source in the browser and see my code?”.

Certifications are not a free pass. In fact, if I’m interviewing you then your certifications can work against you, because I will ask you questions to test your knowledge for your cert. I will then follow up with questions that I know are just outside of the reach of the cert, to see if you were serious about it, or just cramming with an exam guide.