Do Certifications Matter?

This week, a student wrote in an email:

How important is getting a Certification (CompTIA, Cisco, and Microsoft) in the Networking/Computer field? Is there an advantage/benefits to receiving these certification while attending college?

My response:

I get this one a lot. First, we must recognize that certs exist not so much for you but for vendors and employers; the benefit to a tech is somewhat of an illusion.

Hiring managers use certifications to ascertain your base-level knowledge of a product they use within their shop. It’s a pre-screening tool. Certs help employers weed-out people who say they know something but – in reality – aren’t familiar with a product critical to their operations. Hiring managers will also use the cert as a means of justifying incentives for employees.  Otherwise, the cert is otherwise meaningless: the employer will teach you the rest of what they need you to know. They just want to use certs to obtain a qualified candidate and reduce the risk of hiring an unqualified one.

In today’s world, recruiting is done through sophisticated databases and filters; your resume is scanned, its text OCR’d, and you become represented by a serial number in an HRIS. There are thousands of applicants and hiring managers filter candidates based off qualifications and keywords. One of those may be a certification. No certification means you’re likely filtered out. Therefore, as a benefit to you, you could look at certs as just a mechanism to be “relevant” and to be in a list of results.

Meanwhile, vendors use certs as a way to solidify their market. They’ll tout, “There’s a community of thousands of certified engineers out there to help you support your installation,” and, they know that the certified individual will eventually recommend their products when they’re capable of making purchases within an organization. Therefore, certs are a marketing mechanism to vendors.

So the cert is simply a qualifier. The hiring manager is ultimately going to look at your other qualifications, experience, and education with greater attention. This is where the formal degree matters. Primarily, the hiring manager has to look at the ladder she can pay you in and the education requirements within it – if that ladder calls for a 4 year degree, you must have a 4 year degree to earn that level of compensation. Period.

That’s why a formal education is more important. One, it qualifies you for higher compensation ladders. Two, it demonstrates to the hiring manager that you started, stuck-with, financed, and finished a _process_. You showed dedication to a long term and complex goal! That’s more important than the cert or even what your degree was _in_ because it’s a measure of your maturity.  Most employers want to trust that personality more than one that doesn’t complete the education process.

That’s why a formal education trumps certifications every time.

Certs aren’t necessarily valuable to you; they don’t provide a real return to you as an individual – the pay differentials (usually a variable-couple-thousands-of-dollars a year) are nearly insignificant to the employer except with consideration to the Cisco certifications – but they do give you a competitive edge during the job search. They make you “relevant” during a job search. And that’s all they do.

If you’re after higher compensation, work instead on finishing the formal education. That’s what really matters.

Hope that helps -

R

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