RHCE worth it? I think my last post got lost

**Outlaw** · 04-26-2002, 09:27 PM

The best thing you can do for yourself is to get a college degree. All those certs are meaningless in comparison.

I agree, but I think a decent cert (Not MS) can be a good supplement.

**Schotty** · 04-27-2002, 03:30 PM

What needs to be coupled with a certification is someone to be able sto say that that cert has helped them in getting the job done. My N+ and Solaris certs are useful to me only because my current employer can say "Andy did a better job becuase he now knows more in depth detail of the tasks I have been assigning him. What used to take 2 weeks is now done in just over 1 week."

That is what the employers are going to look for. They arent going to stop and say you're hired until the education+experience can be verified and validated as a sense of quality that meets or exceeds their needs.

Make sure your bosses and references are capable of verifying your claims (and in some cases willing).

HTH, just a little insight into the crap IT/IS sector :{ This market better pick up.......

**njcajun** · 05-03-2002, 10:56 AM

Hi,

First, I wanna say that, even though I can't stand 'doze, if you already know *nix, knowing 'doze *will* help you when you go to get a job. The question 'do I wanna work for a company that uses 'doze...' is kinda silly, really. Rarely does anyone in IT work with ONLY one or the other. Rarely do you see IT departments that don't have ANY 'doze boxen somewhere. I work in a place that's only got a couple of windows boxes. I really hardly ever have to work on them at all, but I *do* have to know what's going on. A lot of enterprise applications simply don't run on anything else. I'm not talking about Dreamweaver, either.

Also, a certification alone is not gonna get you a job. If it does, you'll be lucky to make 40K/year at it. While that might be fine as a starting point for you, you should be aware of this. Yes, there are employers who want certifications, but a lot of the ones that will hire based solely on certification are gonna put you on the help desk. DON'T TAKE A HELP DESK JOB!!! You'll get typecast and never get a job doing much else. I've seen it happen. It's the only place in IT I've seen typecasting, and it's bad.

Think about it logically. Would you hire someone who didn't have anything on his resume except for certifications? Wouldn't you want some experience on there?

Trouble with certifications is they only prepare you for the 'IT Machine Room of Eden', where nothing ever goes wrong. A Solaris certification proves you know what VTOC stands for -- but what do you do when yours is corrupt? Here's my HA environment, how can you make it better? Why is this new hardware setup choking on our mail? What the hell is LaTeX, and why does anyone care? These are not answered by certifications. They're answered by experience in things that may or may not have any relevance to your job - depends on the environment. You likely won't see LaTeX at JPMorgan, but you may not see HP OpenView at Addison-Wesley.

Speaking of LaTeX, my boss made me learn how to use it recently and said he can immediately tell when he gets a resume made with it, and they immediately gain credibility in his eyes. I'd recommend to anyone looking for jobs to do your resume with it. It's got a lot of cool features to, like outputting almost simultaneously to html, PDF, or just about any other format. Your resume will get attention. If you go to a resume writer, a professional one who has been around will likely be using some form of TeX.