| Certs are a weird beast. If you are competent and working at a high level in your field, certs not only don't mean anything, they're a negative signal. However, if you've banged around in dead-end entry level jobs till you're 40, didn't go to uni, and are desperate to break the $40k/yr barrier because you've racked up a history of ex-wives and expensive child support payments and spending yet another 5 years renting the room above your now elderly parent's garage...they can mean the difference between $20/hr and a proper full-time job with benefits and an actual real salary. At those kinds of employment levels, and for those kinds of employers, we're not talking about staffers or employers who are passionate about their IT systems or development staff. At those levels IT is a cost center, barely tolerated but necessary. Think "IT guy for a department store". Managed at corporate by somebody who made a name for themselves by being the top floor salesperson of ties and suspenders and who told his manager one day in passing that he can copy CDs to mp3 files and is therefore qualified to run the regional IT systems. Both the employees and the employers in these situations simply have entirely different life priorities than most of the folks here. To these folks the certs are extremely valuable, perhaps a 20-30% pay bump on both sides. To the corporate IT manager he gets to tell his bosses that he has certified staff (and not part-time hobbyists he wrangled up from the Geek Squad when the local Best Buy closed up shop). This metric, at those levels of abstraction is important. To the employee it's a big pay bump, and opens up lots of mediocre, but better paying jobs. If you think of the IT world as analogous to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, the folks on this board are near the top, seeking Self-actualization, but the broader IT world is closer to the bottom of the pyramid and is therefore composed of many more people and positions in that pyramid. Some folks are just simply destined to dwell in the lower levels of the pyramid, either by circumstance or poor life choices, and the cert might be just enough to move them up a level. |