Have you noticed that there is a wide range of opinion on what certifications are supposed to be? Often times, this comes from different points of views from those people that are involved in certifications. This would include certification holders, HR people, hiring managers, trainers, and those working on getting their certifications. These different points of view lead to a lot of the problems that surround the certification industry.
I think it’s actually pretty easy to define what a certification is. It’s a validation that you have passed all of the requirements set forth by the certification issuer. So anything outside of that description is an assumption that people are placing on the certification. I know my statement is pretty simplistic. Maybe overly so. But I think it’s the truth. So let’s talk about Cisco certifications, since that’s what we’re probably all interested in here. In order to get a Cisco certification, all you have to do is pass a test (or multiple tests) and agree to Cisco’s Career Certification Agreement. Nowhere in the agreement does it say that you have to have a certain level of experience, or even that you’ve had to have touched or seen a router or a switch. It also doesn’t mean that you know everything that the certification tests cover. You can bomb a technology or 2 and still pass if you did well on the others.
So why do people add all of these other meanings to what a certification is? Where does the disconnect of “what is” and “what is supposed to be” come from? Well, part of it comes from how the certification vendors advertise their certifications. Part of it comes from the public consensus of what a certification is supposed to mean. And some of it also comes from our own ideas about what a certification is supposed to mean. There are many other contributors as well. The problem is that what a certification validates, and what people think that it is supposed to validate doesn’t always line up.
So how can I made a nerdy networking reference here?… It’s like the difference between an inclusive summary route and an exclusive summary route. An inclusive summary route matches all of the networks that you are shooting for. But it can also include a bunch of networks that you aren’t shooting for. An exclusive summary route only includes the networks that you are looking for. Cisco certifications are like inclusive summary routes. They do verify what people often think that they should. In other words, they will certify those people with the applicable experience and skills relevant to the certification level. But they don’t necessarily exclude the “riff-raff” that some people think should not be getting these certifications. For instance, someone who has never seen a Cisco device in person, or been in an authentic CLI, but who studied the books and practice exams could get their CCNA.
So is this a problem? I don’t think so. Not a big one at least. In order to exclude those people that shouldn’t be earning the certifications (according to some people’s standards), you then force the people who “should” be earning them to jump through some pretty annoying hoops. I don’t think that you can really verify applicable experience. Anything that you can put in a test can pretty much be studied for by someone without the on-the-job experience. And trying to verify experience outside of the test isn’t really doable. Some people seem to want to make the tests harder, but all that will do is just make them take longer to study for. Others want the tests to be heavily simulation focused, but I think that makes it a lot harder to test a broad range of topics like the current format does.
The point I wanted to make in this post is that people need to have a realistic view of what certifications are, and what they are not. A certification will not verify anything beyond what it requires to earn it. If you do want to add assumptions to it (which we often do), you just need to use alternate means to certify those assumptions.
