Qualifications: do they measure up?

Who wants to be a Microsoft Certified Services Engineer (MCSE)? Quite a lot of people, it would seem. IT veterans and wannabes are clamouring to enter vendor certification schemes in increasing numbers. But the proprietary nature of many courses and their high costs makes finding your way through the maze of certification a tough task. Even if you've found the one for you, does it do you any good when it comes to landing a job?

The answer depends on who's doing the recruiting, according to Jake King, permanent sales manager at recruitment firm Abraxas. "We get quite a lot of jobs now where employers say they want someone with an MCSE," he said. "In certain areas, it's almost a given that someone with a few years' experience will have one."

Yet these certificates don't figure in the recruitment policies of some of the biggest user companies. Rani Hesketh, head of IT resourcing and training at Tesco, said the company bases its recruitment policy on a wide range of attributes, of which a professional qualification is just one. The others include academic attainment, aptitude test scores, technical track record and even an assessment of 'stretch potential' - a candidate's perceived ability to progress through the ranks.

Tesco is not particularly interested in certificates at the moment, and Hesketh doesn't see much evidence of other major companies using them either. "We're very interested in the idea of formal measurements of attainment for IT professionals. If there were something that gave an objective assessment of people's skill levels, it would be useful when we're recruiting, assigning or promoting people," she said.

It's market conditions which will determine just how valuable that certificate is, said King. "If you're a Java developer, you can get 10 interviews in no time at the moment. Some of them don't bother to look for a new job before quitting the old one - they'll go off on a month's skiing holiday and look around when they come back."

In fact, demand is currently so ridiculously high that if you have the skills, certification is almost irrelevant, although it will still give you the upper hand.

Experience is keyIn some quarters, however, certificates could actually count against you, especially with applicants who hide behind a certificate to conceal the fact that they don't have enough experience.

Phil Kingsbury, head of support for the Associated Press electronic news production system, said: "We've been forced into a position where we find ourselves rejecting applicants who come to us with an MCSE or Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), because more often than not they've simply rote-learned for the qualification and are unable to put their knowledge into practice."

"If you ask candidates what they would do if a particular fault occurred, it's no good them replying: 'I'd phone Microsoft'," added Kingsbury. "When there's a broadcast in half an hour, that's not an option - you have to fix it."

But if IT services is the direction you would like to take, get studying. "We do a lot of business in the local government area, which places some emphasis on paper qualifications," said John Rees, human resources manager at Bull Information Systems. "When we submit the CV of someone we want to place on contract, it helps if we can show that they have some formal qualifications."

The certificates are also valuable additions to courses. "Formal training is quite costly, so it's good to have something tangible to show for it," added Rees.

It will come as no surprise to hear that vendors' certification schemes are of particular interest to the partners of those suppliers. However, their motives may be fairly selfish, as they may qualify for a higher partnership status if they have the right qualifications on board.

"We do a lot of work with Siebel and SAP, so someone with a vendor certificate in one of those products would get our attention," said Duncan Prior, business stream head for communications and commercials at Druid.

Prior is not quite so enthusiastic about third-party certificates. "They're often too general, and they can sometimes be out of date," he said. "You can even get some kind of SAP qualification at university these days without having had any real experience."

Paper thin qualificationsSome services companies break the mould and generally take a dim view of paper qualifications. Jason Ozin, co-partner at network and IT solution provider Technica Solutions, said: "Our clients know we know our stuff and that we're polite, friendly and reliable. We've never been asked for our qualifications or certifications. We're currently looking for staff and we won't be looking for bits of paper from them either."

The most common complaint about some popular certification schemes is that, because they hinge on multiple choice tests, it's possible to pass without any practical expertise. "For some qualifications, each test consists of a set of questions picked from a finite pool. You can find all the possible questions on the web, and simply memorise the answers," alleged one manager.

The Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) qualification commands universal respect among both employees and recruiters because of its strong emphasis on hands-on experience.

The complexity of the certificate is such that employees in some companies who pass their CCIE have been rumoured to pick up an automatic salary increase of up to £20,000. These people hardly flood the market, though: there are only 4500 CCIEs worldwide, of whom 330 are in the UK.

The CCIE course culminates in a two-day, hands-on lab session where candidates have to diagnose and fix a problem within a strict time limit. The average failure rate for this part of the course is 80 per cent, according to Tony Dyer, Cisco business manager for training company GeoTrain. However, his company claims a 60 per cent to 80 per cent pass rate for students from NetGun, its concentrated six-month training programme.

The course is highly practical and GeoTrain also insists that all students must be sponsored by their company and given relevant on-the-job experience. "It's virtually impossible to pass the lab without having had a job that involved hands-on experience with Cisco equipment," said Dyer.

Do your homeworkIt may not be quite in the same league as the CCIE, but even the much-maligned MCSE qualification can represent a fair amount of effort for anyone who takes it seriously. David Pickering, head of NT systems support at training organisation Learning Tree, recently became an MCSE but only after putting in extra hours of studying in the evening, in addition to the formal courses.

"I used the Microsoft self-teach books which lead you through practical tasks to back up the coursework," he said. "You probably don't have to do this amount of work, but I wanted to pass first time."

Even though Pickering was already experienced in most of the areas covered, he said home study rounded out his knowledge and enabled him to see straight to the root of problems which previously he might have had to work around.

In this instance, personal motivation helped him to get more out of his certification programme. He wanted the certification not to get a new job, but for his own satisfaction.

Gillian Brand, marketing manager at Learning Tree, believes this is the prime motivator for many students. "Self esteem comes into it a lot - showing that you're as good at your job as the next person."

For many candidates, however, certification is just the icing on the training cake, and they are the people who need to shop around for the right course. The choice is huge, ranging from 'boot camps' designed to get you from zero to certificate in two weeks, to those focused on learning a specific technology or role, where certification is an optional extra.

You can, of course, follow the self-study route to certification, but some students feel they would miss out this way. Jon Browne is founder and managing director of Ibis Business Consultants and decided early on to send himself on formal courses, rather than study alone, to gain his various Novell and Microsoft certifications. "You can't ask a book a question," he pointed out.

Was it worth the effort, given that he was studying something of which he already had hands-on experience? "Yes," he answered. "There were a number of things I'd successfully been doing wrong. I was proud of having kept a Novell fileserver running for a year, and on the course I learned that I should have downed it once a month."