I’m semi-officially hitching my wagon to the Salesforce.com star, so I’ve decided to certify my in-the-trenches experience by taking the Certified Administrator exam on Wednesday. If you read about the value of certifications, you’ll come to one conclusion: the consensus is inconclusive (given, that first link is from 2004, and I would guess that certifications go up and down in value depending on job supply and demand). As big a proponent of education as I am, I agree that you’ve got to put classroom lessons to use; I’ve seen plenty of people with certificates out the wazoo who couldn’t tell a CD-ROM drive from a cupholder. But does that mean certifications are utterly worthless?
One point I think these articles aren’t focusing on enough is that a certification may not be a value-add feature in a candidate; given two otherwise equal candidates, you’re not going to hire both of them but pay the one with the certificate a bonus. Rather, a cert is a baseline requirement; it’s a barrier to entry, meaning that the candidate without the cert doesn’t even get to the next stage of the hiring process.
Think about it from the perspective of the gatekeeper: if you’re an internal recruiter or hiring manager at a large firm looking at 500 candidates, a certification helps you quickly winnow down the pile. Is it right and/or fair? Maybe not, but it may be reality. After all, while IT wonks and cube dwellers may be right in the belief that a certification doesn’t guarantee expertise, it does tend to require the certificate holder to have at least been exposed to the material. That can eliminate wasted cycles in the initial screening process, which makes the recruiter’s job that much easier, and reinforces the practice.
Bottom line? A cert can’t hurt–but it may not do anything more than open the door.