So, my evil horrible no-good brother is out of work, and he’s telling my dad that he can’t get a new job because he never bothered to get certified for the work he was doing at his old job, and that every job on his level you need a MCSE certificate for. (We’ll ignore the fact that that doesn’t keep him from getting any other kind of job, as he has three children and a disabled wife. Dad props him up for the kids, so he’s no particular hurry.) Anyway, you can’t trust a word he says, so my parents asked me to verify.
Is this true? Or is it one of those things where it’s always in the job description but equivalent experience can get you hired?
We’ve seen a few places offering MCSE training, and crap is it expensive! Is there some sort of accreditation to look for? The local community college has courses, but there also seem to be private tech training companies.
MCSE qualifications churned out by certification factories may be largely useless, but it’s a bit of a non-GQish sweeping statement to say that everybody who has one is useless. I don’t have one, but know many competent people who do. I guess they felt they might as well get the certificate if some employers seem to value it.
As for the OP, (1) is pretty much correct, but for junior jobs it may be one of the main differentiating factors among candidates.
Regarding 1), it really depends on whether the company you’re applying to uses keyword filters on submitted resumes. If they do, then yeah, it could be kinda tough to get by without one. But there are jobs out there at companies who don’t rely solely on mechanical resume screening, and enough that he shouldn’t have trouble finding one if he were really trying.
The MCSE exam costs about $125 to take. If your brother has the experience then he should not need to take an expensive training course. There are loads of (free) resources available on the internet - even example test papers - for him to use to brush up exam techniques etc.
Many potential employers do use qualifications as candidate filters so it is quite believable that he might be struggling to get interviews without it.
I have been looking for an IT job and an MCSE will not get you a job if you do not have the experience to back it. With the right experience most employers do not need the certs, but they can help you get in the door based on stupid HR keyword searches.
Are you sure? The local community college has the whole shebang (including courses, of course) at eight freaking thousand dollars, and cites as part of that that all 7 exams cost about a thousand. Are there not seven exams, and do they not cost a thousand bucks? Or are they fudging the truth and adding their own stuff to what’s technically required?
In the current market conditions he may have trouble getting interviews for roles that require it, but most roles don’t. Equivalent experience counts. It depends a lot on what he is doing. MCSE is Microsoft technologies, so if he works with something different then he is being inaccurate.
An easy way to tell if he is being truthful is to go onto Monster or something similar and search for jobs in his area. See how many come up that require MCSE. Anyway, there is still no reason he could not take a lower roles, or get a lower level certification which would be cheaper than MCSE.
Any shop that is an MS partner will be required to have X number of certifications in-house (I don’t know how many). Not being certified will not always prevent you from being hired, but once hired you will probably need to get some certifications. If you already have them, that may get you to the head of the line.
Any other place I have been usually doesn’t care if you have any certs.
In all my career I have only worked for one place that was an MS partner.
The MCSE isn’t absolutely neccessary, but it’s useful as kind of objective proof that you have some knowledge (at the least, you must be sufficiently brainy and organised to study for and pass the exams). If your EHNGB is really experienced, he should be able to pass the exams without doing any expensive courses, although I would recommend doing a few Transcender practice tests to get a feel for what the questions are like.
The qualification CAN help differentiate you from a crowd of otherwise similarly experienced applicants, so I would say it’s worth it. Certainly I feel the better for having done it. (In my spare time, over the course of about 18 months).
I’m really only doing the CCNA to fill in my lack of knowledge (and because of sheer pig-headedness) of the networking side of things. I have no real expectations that it will have a financial payoff… or at least, not any time soon.
I’ve been a techie in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10 years now. (Geez, has it been that long?)
Experience is king in the IT world. The certs are used as tiebreakers between roughly equally qualified candidates or as quick and dirty way of filtering through resumes when there are way too many applicants to browse each resume by hand. Otherwise, it’s all about having demonstrable experience in the technologies the employer regularly utilizes.
Microsoft offers a Microsoft Certified Trainer certification. You can ask if the instructor is MCT certified in the subject he/she is teaching. That’s about as close to MCSE coursework accreditation as you’re going to get.
Certs are never a disadvantage, but competent hiring organizations know that they’re secondary. There are tons of worthless MCSEs out there, and there are tons of rock-solid people with no MCSE. In other words, if your brother has MCSE-level experience without having the cert, his resume is at a disadvantage, but certainly not out of the running.
Not having the cert is not an excuse for not going job-hunting, which is the feeling that I’m getting from the OP. (FWIW, I took the CCNP and CCDA on my own while jobhunting furiously. But I do not know enough of the MS certs - they may have a class/coursework requirement…)
It’s one of those situations where it doesn’t help you but most employers want it.
Employers will ask do you have the certification and if you say “no,” you’re dropped ASAP. Then they go through the other 50 people who DO have it. Then if none of those work, ONLY THEN, do they return.
It’s like I’ve had so many jobs that require a college degree. They don’t care what it’s in, they just want a degree. It’s supposed to show you have the ability to stay with something.
So the actual certification doesn’t teach you much, but now with employers searching resumes by CTRL+F you should someone get that word in.
Another issue with the cerification I found is many people in another job in the company can do the work, so the company will pay the person less and just hire them to do it. So it does matter for pay.
If your brother is truly interested he should pick some jobs he doesn’t want and lie on his resume. That way he can see if he gets the interviews with the companies. He may be able to bluff the way into the job and if not, and he’s forced to produce evidence he can simply say, “OK thanks but I just got another offer,” and end the interview at that stage.
It would be an interesting test to see if it IS the certifcation that’s holding him up
Well, I just recently started a job as an IT management professional with no formal qualifications beyond the ones I got in secondary school - it’s true that a qualification-obsessed recruiter may dismiss out of hand all and any applications that don’t tick the boxes, but that’s not by any means the full story.
If you can demonstrate real-world aptitude for the job, and can get past the initial selection stage of recruitment, it’s possible to get a job that requires a qualification you don’t formally hold. In some cases, if your prospective employer wants something very specific about the qualification (for example, some formal methodology, to fit in with their processes), they may put a promising applicant through the training themselves.
If the qualifications are that vital, it’s possible to acquire them by putting yourself through the training course - either at a training centre, or by distance learning.
I run an ISV which is an MS partner. “Partner” means we get help from MS selling our stuff and in turn we help them sell their stuff.
We generally do not hire non- MS-certified people. If somebody is really good, but lacks a cert, we hire them & require them to get a cert within 6 months.
Why? Not because we believe these certs are magic proof of skill. But because MS gives us a lot of cookies more or less proportional to how many certified people we have. And, by and large, certified people have a better understanding of how it all works. Self-taught people are often blind to areas they didn’thappen to use in their last job.
Backing off a bit, certs were pretty meaningful back in about 2001. Since then their value as a qualification currency has been badly debased by widely available cheat-sheets on the net, cram courses, etc. Meanwhile, many of the tests have degraded into trivia contests. So today you can get many certs while still being mostly clueless about the topic.
MS is trying to restore some quality & real-world relevance to the testing process by replacing triva questions with simulations of actual actions needing skills you’d be expected to perform on the job. The jury is very much out on whether this effort will succeed.
My bottom line for the OP’s Q: Like the other posters, I think that for most large companies, certs are a key screening tool for HR (not that they should be, just that they are). Ditto for MS-centric shops that use the Partner system. For small non-partner MS shops or small non-MS shops they are less important.
Still, the OPs’ bro oughta be pounding the pavement by day, and studying for the exams by night. Each test has an official MS book you can buy used for $10-ish. Each test costs $125, and they often run sales on retests if you flunk one. A viable technique for an experienced guy is to buy & read the book to learn which trivia & which terminolgy is hot on the test, then take the test & almost pass (thereby learning a lot more about where his weak areas are), read some more and pass it easily the second time.
If he is trying, he can do one test a month. Maybe more if he really is good at what he claims he is.
Zsofia, my best answer is that it depends. I can only tell you what I look for in prospective candidates.
If I’m hiring for a system administrator job, and the candidate is in his or her mid-20s, then an MCSE is very important – to even get them in the door. They’ve tried to make up their lack of experience by learning new skills. Conversely, if the candidate is over 30 and has at least 5 years of prior, meaningful experience, I don’t care if he or she has a certification or not. The experienced IT people have some nasty battle scars and no certification can substitute them, because you know why? The 25-year-old MCSE will most certainly get his ass-kicked and spend a few weekends at work.
The only certification that has maintained its credibility is the CCIE – mainly because the test is both written and hands-on. I’ve never met a fellow CCIE who didn’t know their stuff. This partly due to the test preparation, the jobs you’re guaranteed to get with the cert (oftentimes challenging, fun stuff), and the requirements for re-certification.