A certification is a great asset. But just as the shiny new convertible depreciates the minute you drive it away, so too does your certification. Within two to four years of earning a cert, either the vendor will explicitly make it obsolete or the underlying technology has changed so much that you'll need to recertifiy to demonstrate your knowledge. Therefore, you need to be clear that once you do embark on a certification path, it won't hold its value forever and you'll need to regularly update it.

I still get e-mails from people asking about career opportunities in IT once they complete a certification program. Unfortunately these folks seem to have unrealistic expectations about the ease of entering IT, let alone the types of roles that they are qualified to perform once their certification is completed. There is no short cut to IT riches, and I'm not sure that there ever was. I don't know if it was ever true that certification alone is the ticket to earning $60-70K+, but it sure isn't the case anymore! The only way I can explain this is that, in the past, some of the really early adopters of certification had nothing but their own experience and the product manuals (if they were lucky!) to use to prepare for exams. Then, when usage of these products started booming, those folks who had extensive experience were in huge demand. In many cases they had completed the certification, but this was simply a demonstration of their theoretical knowledge -- it was their extensive practical knowledge that employers were excited about. From a distance, perhaps others got the mistaken impression that it was the certification alone that was their source of value to employers and customers, but I would have hoped that these days this myth was largely dispelled. In my work at CertCities.com's sister magazine, Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine, I know that the editorial staff have tried very hard over the last few years to pass on the message in their annual salary survey results that experience is a very important factor in the salary levels reported. However, I suspect that in many cases people are too busy looking at the dollar numbers in the tables to read any of the accompanying text!

The last area of confusion is to those who appear to confuse a certification with a career. Someone who now wants to work as a DBA on say Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server needs to know that there is so much more to these roles than just the requirements of these certification programs alone. It's one thing to know all of the wonderful commands and their switches, but it's another altogether to know what you should use in a given situation. Education and certification can assist in giving us the latest theoretical knowledge, but there's no substitute for years in the field. In this case, building a career as a DBA is not the same as completing a certification in a database product.

The same is particularly true of the developer arena. Most programming exams focus on language and class library implementation/API details, yet experience in the the art of good analysis, design and testing is probably more important in a successful career as a developer than just the code itself. In other words, just because you get an MCSD, it doesn't mean you're qualified to be an application developer.

Completing a certification can be a valuable asset in your career, but it alone won't and can't take you very far. (For anyone that thinks I'm just down on certification, I also believe that the same is true of a degree -- you really need the practical experience in combination with the theoretical knowledge to be valuable to an employer.) What do you think is reasonable to expect from a certification these days? Let me know by posting your comments below.