I am set to graduate from college in May with a degree in Information Systems. I currently have no IT certifications but I do have over 7 years or progressive technical experience (LAN design and now management.) Since I probably won’t stay with my current employer, what do employers value more: job experience or certifications (if a potential employee doesn’t have both)?
I prefer ability to do the job, whatever it might be. But equally important are such things as working with others, logical reasoning, and communications skills. I also value loyalty and a strong work ethic. The certifications are nice, but sometimes it’s harder to retrain someone who thinks he already knows.
I agree with Liberal (no, really, I do 
). Someone with the right attitude and experience can be pretty much taught what is needed to do the job (depending on what that is). There are so many paper mills out there where you end up with the certificate, but can’t figure out how to turn on a computer. Unfortunately, you have to get by HR departments who more than likely will only look at your certificates before anything else. You have to be able to network properly to get around them.
So, if you have a good network, ignore the certs. If you don’t then you’ll probably have to have some sort of paper to make the HR drones happy.
In the end, certifications are there to get other certifications.
For example, if someone wants to be a Microsoft Certified shop, they have to have a minimum number of certified people who are certified in X, Y, and Z. If they want to sell Cisco it’s another list of certifications.
Other than that, they’re just for getting your foot in the door. If you were in my area and had 7 years of experience I’d get your hired - but I can guarantee you won’t want to make what the lower-level people in our company make. 
-Joe
Moderator’s Note: Moving from Great Debates to IMHO.
You have seven years of experience plus a degree. That’s worth far more than some paper MCSE who can barely wipe his arse. The latter will parrot the Microsoft answer and be out of his depth when presented with a new problem; you, on the other hand, have faced a wide variety of issues.
Certifications are useless.
As a former hiring manager, I always preferred experience. Those shops that are MS partners may require you to get a certificate (because MS requires X number of people on your staff to have one) but my experience was that if you had the right experience, they would let you get your certificate after you were hired. Of course, everyone’s experience will vary.
OK So with the experience and know how from otjt it’s not much of a problem to bone up on the certification exam and pass it in a whizz.
A certification may not seem like much but experience PLUS an accumulation of them impresses prospective employers.
What merijeek said.
Certifications are also there to impress the HR manager who has to screen applications before passing them on to the IT hiring manager, who actually understands the rest of the gobbledygook on the average geek’s resume.
Certifications are also there to impress the non-techie boss who doesn’t believe that a smoothly functioning IT department is sufficient proof that the staff know what they’re doing.
I’ve been a manager. I never hired, nor even decided to interview, someone because of their certifications.
Some of them are actually useful, or at least the preparation is. I’m talking upper level Cisco certs, RHCSE/A, some of the vendor certs for big hardware - especially if you ever plan on making a living as a consultant.
I think a competent manager should be pretty clued-in regarding what papers are actually valuable.
I don’t have any myself, but I’m working on getting the degree outta the way, first. Frankly, though, a lot of what I’m learning for my IT BS is less relevant to my current career in IT than the skills I picked up earning my BA in History.
There’s depressingly little hands-on lab time, and what exercises we actually do are generally devioid of any actual problem-solving requirements. It’s mostly high level stuff - the Routing & Switching class never touches IOS, and in the Linux Administration class, we never left GNOME. You are not permitted to take a class in C unless you’re an EE/CE student. Ten weeks on the buttons to click to “administer” Active Directory? Bleh.
It’s a real, four-year University, with what’ll probably be the first nationally accredited IT curriculum in the country, but it’s really a factory for churning out Web Designers, Java GUI programmers, and glorified MCSEs.
I’m half considering taking a couple of quarters off to go for the RHCSE or one of the CC’s, if my employer’s game for it.
My employer’s looking for a new IT person and the IT department is actually getting to look over the resumes and pick the candidates. We’re not looking at certifications, although they’re nice if we notice them. What we’re looking for is experience and we’re not even considering people who have little or none. The job the person will be doing simply isn’t suited to someone with no experience.
I mentioned this thread to one of my coworkers while we were discussing resumes. He and I have differing experiences with people with Microsoft Certifications. While he’s known some quite good people, I’m afraid one of the stupidest technicians I worked with was also MS certified. She was competent enough within her limits, but she didn’t do well with anything other than routine problems.
I studied for MS certification myself and was considering going for it once, and I found it to be mostly a matter of rote memorization, although I could be wrong. What I want in a coworker isn’t someone who’s memorized a list of facts; I want someone who can solve problems and suggest viable ways to make things run better. If you have experience, there’s at least a reasonable possibility you’ll have that. A certification alone tells me nothing about your ability to solve problems.
CJ
We definitely favor real-world experience. One applicant came to us with a MSCE certification, but clearly didn’t know anything that would be useful in the job (it seems like he crammed for the test and then just forgot about it).
IT is still very much hands on. Also, any certification become obsolete very rapidly (if you had Windows 2000 certification, it would mean that much now). You want to hire someone who shows the ability to learn, since in two years things are probably going to be very different.