On Jan 22, 2005, at 6:23 AM, Kim Onnel wrote:

There is some truth in all of that. Experience is king, at least if the person doing the evaluation has a clue. If you have done impressive things in the past that show you have what it takes to go to that next level, then that should be all you need. However, when coming from another company, or sometimes even within a single company, the documentation isn't there to check this. A good technical interview, asking fair questions can fish out a good bit too.

What a certification does, is push the job of figuring out a baseline level of knowledge to someone else. Its like a college degree in the sense it doesn't guarantee all that you know, however it should at least guarantee a certain minimum level of knowledge give or take.

When doing the initial screening process of a bunch of people chasing a job, things like college degrees and certifications help people narrow down the pack a bit. Its a metric. If you just look at say 10 resumes, and they are Network Engineers, and they each have 5 years experience well here is the problem:

- Peoples opinion of what "Network Engineer" means differs greatly.

- Five years experience at one company may have been a totally different experience than someone, else's five years at another company.

- Some people seem to blow up there resumes a bit in IT, thinking they have to be an expert in everything, so they list every acronym known to mankind, you can do some fishing in the technical interview, but its hard to cover all the bases.

- With some jobs like VARs, the certs matter alot. It makes there company look good to clients, and there are incentives to the company from the vendors, to have such people on staff. With ISP's though this shouldn't matter.

- The people doing the hiring and making these decisions are the point haired bosses, and sometimes they really don't know the difference between a packet and frame, and so they rely more heavily on something tangible like a certification rather than what you say you have done but they can't prove.

Good point. Some companies, like Redhat, Juniper, and Cisco have some certifications that you couldn't cheat on if your life depended on it, because they are practical lab based. I can only hope that those that would cheat, not just on a certification, but on the entire interview process, get discovered and quickly terminated. I took a test in QoS recently, from Cisco, and I was pretty impressed. I had to actually configure routers (virtual), use show commands to answer some questions, etc. It was a mix, of multiple choice plus practical, and a step in the right direction.

In the end, if you feel you are getting a raw deal, you probably are. The ISP business is a tough one, especially if your not working at a very large provider. IT in general, sometimes the only way to get those significant increases in roles or compensation is to leave and take a new job.

If you have no real operational experience, but you are certified, then you will not get alot of pay in the ISP arena because there is much to learn. Your pay will be the experience you get.

Brian