--- Kim Onnel <karim.adel at gmail.com> wrote:

<disclaimer> I do technical interviews for senior networking folks </ disclaimer>

Certs are fine, but they have no bearing on the questions I ask. The most important thing you can do is BE HONEST. If you put it on your resume, I'm going to consider it fair game for questions, and if you're faking, the interview is over. Examples of faked things on resumes I've seen recently include:

IGRP: ok, when EXACTLY was the last time anyone used this in practice? if it's more than 10 years, leave it off. If it's on the resume, I'll dredge up a question for you regarding the difference between IGRP and something else...

Appletalk: I've had 4 candidates in the past month include appletalk on their resumes, and none have used it within the past 7 years. One fellow went so far as to include AURP (the Appletalk routing protocol) in the list of skills, even though it had been more than 10 years since he had used it. It's too bad, because I actually crafted some pretty good questions... <sigh>

MPLS: If you only have book knowledge of something, then you don't really know it, and it doesn't belong in a skill-list.

That said, Certs will get you past recruiters, so they're useful for that. However, many of the intro-level certs test on things which are completely divorced from real-world scenarios. An example is that the CCNA includes stuff about IGRP and classful networking, and some of the assumptions you have to make to pass it haven't been valid since pre IOS 11.1 days...