Education? Experience? Certification?

April 15, 2004 · 14 Comments

I was recently asked the following question:

How would you rate Educations vs. Experience vs. Certifications in todays IT environment? (i.e Should one focus more on obtain certifications or experience or both).

I responded as follows (and the questioner asked that I share my answer on the blog for wider commentary from y'all):

A lot depends on where you are in your career. Early on, education is important because, well, it's basically all you have. Similarly, certification shows that you are dedicated to improving your skills and getting official recognition of your knowledge. Over time education becomes less important as your experience grows. I'm a bit ambivalent about certification in general, I must admit. I have never felt the need to obtain any certification and I've never lost a job opportunity because I didn't have a particular certification. I also feel that most certifications - like most exam-based evaluations - don't really measure your skills, only what you are capable of memorizing short term.

Since responded, I realized that there's a pragmatic addendum to the above:
On the other hand, if you have two candidates and they are otherwise equally well-suited for a particular job, picking the one who has some certifications over the one that doesn't is a reasonable approach. And then there are some certifications that are hard enough to get that they do speak to the candidate's abilities.

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14 responses so far ↓

1 eokyere // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

over time, your education (which is like fine wine) becomes even more important, not less important... you begin to appreciate those basic things you had learnt in the past... you are able to draw from those basic experiences to create newer experiences... as creatures of habit, our experiences, if we have same over certain periods, push us towards automatic behavior (which allows us to do certain things more efficiently)... as you rightly say, certificate are seals on our achievements (which simply means seals on education/experience) now, if education there meant *formal* (college/uni) education... which would mean uni vs certifications, i still go with the fact that a uni education is appreciated more as we age and give broader perspectives on things as against certifications eokyere
2 Kevin Hoyt // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

Certification has always been a point of contention with me. It seems that everybody and their mother has some acronym following their name or on their resume. I'd generally agree that everything else being equal, I'd prefer to hire the fellow with the certification over the fellow with nothing, but what does that really mean? Does it mean that person is better at taking tests? Did I just pass up the better, more experienced candidate because he couldn't take a test very well? Weak argument? Perhaps, but consider this... If certifications were more structured, say managed by an accredited organization or by the government itself, we might actually be able to take this IT thing from what is essentially a trade, to a profession (consider the difference closely). I've heard more than one hiring manager scoff at certifications, but if somebody is a lawyer that's passed the bar, or a doctor that has performed their residency, do we not respect them with more authority, automatically? That's what I'd like to see - IT as a profession.
3 Pat Branley // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

I would agree that education (University/college) is way more important that certifications. For example, if im a certified cold fusion developer i might be able to tell you everything there is the know about the workings of a struct and what colours you can use on bar chart with CFCHART. But what it doesnt teach you are things that apply to computer science in general like why sorting my data with a selection sort is slower O(n) than using a quick sort O(log n) or why mvc patterns are better than spagetti code. I think its the things you learn that apply to any implementation are the key things to learn.
4 Micha Schopman // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

I've also done CF certification, and to be honest, it was nothing more than another piece of paper. The things you should learn for such an exam, are problem solving and thereby picking the right equipment out of the cfml tag library. And even more, how to put hat equipment at work as best as possible. How often did I come along bad code, not out of a personal view on specific tags, but for example nested loops done thousands of time each request, where a structKeyExists would do 0ms, and the filled structure could be easily cached for reuse. The most important part of someones skills, is how that person is able to determine a problem, and how that person is solving it. Can that person come up with a somewhat nice technical solution instead of the easy solution.
5 Calvin Ward // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

It's probable that each category has outlying exceptions. Education is often gained at an early age and could consist of general to specific. How that translates into employable knowledge is often suspect. I've had and worked with college graduates with CS degrees who didn't understand simple concepts concerning re-use, complex datatypes, much less design patterns. Conversly, when you come from certain schools, there is more likely to be a level of well roundedness which may be desirable. Experience is a stronger indicator of desirable skills. Well articulated and verifiable experience is the number one consideration of the three, without a doubt. Certification seems to be intended as a measurement of experience, however often a good test taker will outperform a skilled developer. Having said that, Certifications are one thing that are most directly comparable. If someone has gained Advanced on CF Certification in Miami and another has gained Advanced in New York, we can be reasonable confident they've met the same certification criteria. Where as education, as listed on a resume, doesn't necessarily mean so as simply. Each applicant to a position is a unique consideration, and their education and experience are unlikely to measure one to one with another, and for the time being we will have to rely on our ability to judge and measure their resumes and assessments based on these factors and others to make the right choice for the position we have in mind. There's my rambling 2c:)
6 Craig M. Rosenblum // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

I've done cf5 certification, and i am studying to take the cfmx certification. As web developer's it's really hard to have some portfolio to show or prove that we know what we are doing. To substitute for that, we have certifications. To prove we can take a test well. When is started out in cf, there was no classes available, so like all my fellow cfer's i was self-taught. However that didn't reduce the demand of employer's asking what classes i had taken to learn cf, even tho there was none available. To me, it's all about not getting eliminated, because hirer's just look for any reason to eliminate you, not because you are a bad worker, but because they must have a process of eliminating the trash to hopefully find the golden employee. but in my own earlier days, when i was a fast food manager, i always tended to rely more upon my gut instincts, in terms of someones character and desire to work hard. Work ethic is everything!
7 Michael Ramirez // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

After reading all of the comments above I am beginning to see that experience is the most important of the three (Education,Experience,Certification). Education will help build a foundation but only through experience will you be able to expand that foundation. Good certifications like RHCT,RHCE,CCIE can only be achieved through experience. I have not certification and have been wanting to pursue some but have been reluctant because of the "Just a Piece of Paper" mentality. I truly thing that more certifications should follow the CCIE and RHCE example. What if the Coldfusion was hand-on. Like having to setup the server on both linux and windows and then buiding the back-end to a prebuilt web front-end using CFC's. These are just my thoughs. I am very close to graducation with my BS in Computer Science and I have a very dissatisfied feel for my education. I have learn the general computer science skills but not really challenging and nothing that I am using today. I would like to see all IT education take a more read-it, do-it, learn-it approach.
8 Chad Ullman // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

The group I work with is in the midst of hiring right now and we've been interviewing like crazy (with exteremelly disapointing results). I can honestly say that just because someone has a certification after their name doesn't mean they can do the job. It's glaringly obvious that the trick is not in what you know but how you are able to apply it. Certification (and most formal education) teaches you concepts and techniques, but only experience and apptitude enable you to apply those concepts and techniques to the real world. Some of the most competent people I've ever met in this field have never taken a CS class in their life, but they can think. Conversley, I know people with Masters degrees in CS who weren't worth a damn. I myself have a background in evolutionary biology and genetics, which trained me to think and observe, something that's proven to be far more useful to me then understanding the differences between LISP, COBOL and C. To get back to the original question, I'd say that experience is the number one criterion for actually landing the job. Education and certification are helpful in passing the initial resume screening though, so they can't be completely dismissed. My 2 cents
9 Brian Lesser // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

The two datastructures courses I took at University were among the best things I ever did. It is partly that while working I can never justify spending that much time on one problem. Taking full-term courses where you really dig into things in depth is not the only way to learn but often is a key indicator if someone will be capable of tackling difficult problems. There are many positions where a computer science degree is a requirement. If you have one your resume may be read from start to finish. If not it will not get any real attention. Yours truly, -Brian
10 seancorfield // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

I've worked in a variety of fields within IT and a couple of them (business programming, in COBOL, and web development) did not require degrees in Comp Sci but the vast majority of places I've worked pretty much wouldn't look at someone without a Comp Sci degree. Having said that, one of the best programmers I ever hired had quit school at 16 and was a self-taught games developer by the time he joined my team - to do financial programming in C. I don't know what Comp Sci is like over here (in the USA) but my degree course covered compiler theory, machine architecture, assembler, Pascal, Lisp (and other non-numeric computation systems including functional programming, Turing machines and Markov algorithms) as well as the full gamut of sorting, searching, data structures and algorithms. The compiler theory and the non-numeric computation has been the stuff that I've found most useful in my career.
11 Steven Erat // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

I would like to break down types of certifications into three categories, 'paper', performance-based, and University. Paper certifications, such as the ColdFusion certification. This type is often achieved by passing a short exam in one session, and I believe that it only tests short term memory. I've completed this type of exam and I if I were an employer I wouldn't value this type of cert very much. Then there are the performance based exams such as RHCT/RHCE. In that test, your objective is demonstrate competence through an extended session where you configure a new installation according to a specification, and then proceed to repair the system under a wide variety of intentional misconfigurations. In that case, you must really understand what you are doing due to the complexity of the system. I've completed this type of test, and as an employer I would value it highly as the skills required to pass the test are the very same skills needed in the real world. The only drawback of this cert is that it, too, is somewhat based on short term memory retention as the tests are given at the end of a crash course, and without any follow-up on the course material upon return to the 'wild', those skills may fade away. Finally, there is the University Continuing Education Certification which is in my estimation no different from a full time University education, other than the rate at which courses are completed. As a working adult one can usually take one or two courses per semester and hope to achieve a certification in this or that after 3 to 6 semesters. Here the distinguishing factor is the number of courses and the quality of the educators in the classroom. For a couple of years I've been testing the waters at 4 different adult education programs in the greater Boston area. I've found a wide range in the quality of the content, quality of the facilities, and the quality of the instructor, and that as a general rule of thumb ý you get what you pay for. Often instructors are chosen based on their technical proficiency but they may make poor educators. I think that the instructors are the most important factor when choosing an adult education program. Poor facilities can be a real pain, but a good instructor will make up for it by delivering a knockout class. The second most important factor to me would be the curriculum. I've seen programs in J2EE that still have a class in AWT/Swing, which I believe is both outdated and inappropriate. As an employer I would research (read 'google') the University where a potential employee obtained this type of certification, and then give the proper credit based on what I can garner from its curriculum and from public opinions. Another distinguishing factor to consider is that it requires dedication and serious intent to pursue a University certification at night school as a working adult, so when comparing a young person fresh out of a 4 year liberal arts program and an older experienced person with a University cert, I'd choose the cert in this case. I don't think that its fair to make blanket statements about all certifications as a single Class, but rather an employer must evaluate the quality of the specific cert by considering the fine details as described above.
12 Patrick Whittingham // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

As an IT professional with over 25 years of experience and who knows various technologies like Peoplesoft, Crystal Report, Verity, PL/SQL, SQL, Essbase, CF, Flash, XML, DHTML/CSS (etc...) and having learned dozens of languages in the past. A 'good' developer can spot a quality developer by asking objective and subjective questions about a candidates work history. A certificate by itself is just a memory skill set and is meaningless in real life. I've interview many consultants over the years and sometimes 'gut' feeling based upon knowledge of the past work history is better than other means. I've been interviewed many times and the questions asked don't represent good fact finding.
13 Arvind Pal Singh // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

When I look back 10 years, University Degree or education seem to be an important gate pass to get into industry. I believe, IT industry wouldnt have even interviewed me, if I wasnt having degree. However, they did hire me though I mentioned - I dont have any of related experience. Their brief answer - You have got what we need, and we will train you to suit our needs. And this was my first opportunity to get into IT. Now, after 10 years, I realize, when I go for job interview, none looks at what university degrees I have. They just see, if I have related experience or not. Not even certifications. Probably, they also go as per gut feelings after asking a few subjective questions, to find the suitability of candidate for the job. Personally, I feel I will go for certifications just to compete with other equally-suitable person, and to prove my desire for continuous learning in an organized manner.
14 Kayem // Sep 8, 2004 at 5:04 PM

Im going to take my Flash MX 2004 Developer cert this week and CFMX cert next week . Mainly because my boss is an ass that thinks that if you don't have a degree or any paper you don't know anything. There are a number of people that he goes to first too perform tasks simply because they have a degree. It's so so sad. 90% of the time they come to me asking how do I do this how do I do that. I've given "programmers" (I'm going to use that term loosley) tutorials on using cfc's, what classes are, why File.Swf works localy but not on the server (actual file name is file.swf, case sensativity) and yet It's assumed i know nothing. I'm a self taught H.S. drop-out with a GED, 1 1/2 years of college with 5+ years web development experience. With my stats looking like that a cert would make me look a lot beter on paper because when your going for a job all they see at first is paper. Certs are good for people like me with very little formal education.

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