Vendor Certifications vs. College Degree - TechTalk Episode 28
Transcript
hi this is key from Versailles geek.com you're listening to episode 28 / / each Tech Talks so today we're going to talk about something that we don't talk about enough and that's going to be kind of career education the kind of evidence or the catalyst for this conversation is a blog post that I had on virtualized geek.com talking about vendor certifications versus a college degree and which is the best if not both which are which is the best method to kind of get in tonight into
IT you know it's not an easy question um and I think it a lot of it depends on your specific use case or what technology that you're looking to get it break into your career growth goals your position in life and where you kind of for see yourself in the next couple of years when it comes to both position and salary it's not you know a simple one is better than the other one that you can legally say that getting a college degree is going to
be always better than getting certification or getting certification is going to be always better than getting a college degree or whether or not you should give both or not so we're going to talk about kind of my use case and and hopefully my experience can help you make a decision on where to make your investment in both time and money so from a career perspective I get started in IT in 1998 working the IT helpdesk I get that job because I worked as a reservations agent
and what a popular hotel chain and I had a lot of experience of working with customers over the phone so a lot of great customer service experience along with that I was are always a power user in high school programmed as a hobby as i went into my young adulthood I continued with technology and understanding and learning windows and breaking and fixing my own pc so from a career path perspective when you talk about IT information technology specifically kind of that help desk desktop support role
versus going into the more engineering type disciplines such as programming or an analyst role kind of my hobbies Lin Lin adjuster my my strengths lended itself to a setting enrolled and the help desk and kind of locking my career in that path and I want to use that term locking in my career in my head that path a very purposeful d because I didn't have a formal education in programming or formal education that gave me the skill set to do analyst I kind of went with
what I knew what I knew was windows technologies and eventually novell networking networking in general Microsoft networking so that kind of pushed me into or kept my career path along the way of the infrastructure technology around with that I focused on getting vendors certifications around those technologies so cisco certified network administrator microsoft certified systems engineer certified no vale engineer technologies that lended itself to supporting the infrastructure a career like many of our careers kind of plateaued back in may be about 2003 i wanted to start
to look at doing more than just infrastructure support i wanted to get look into getting or a network engineer i want to look more into potentially taking a path that led me into a management route and got some pretty blunt advice from probably one of the best managers over here was that Keith you know what you're stunning because one from a HR perspective you don't have a degree and then two from a skillset perspective I new infrastructure but I didn't really have a strong background in
other IT disciplines that you need to have to have a balanced career so I big the bullet took the otters tour to are the tough tour of getting my degree over the next six years from 2003-2009 I focused on getting undergrad and therefore 2009 2012 got the Masters it's most definitely paid off the timing was perfect I got laid off from my job in late two thousand or mid-2009 right when I was getting my degree and having the degree doing a very tough job market served
me extremely well so I was able to leverage my at that time 12 years of 12 13 years of experience whatever there was at that time to get a job to carry me to Maryland to Lockheed Martin where I picked up additional skill and really learning on learning how to be an engineer uh you know as technologists or specifically as IT folks we like to call ourselves engineers but you know kind of electrical engineers and other systems engineers kind of look at our processes in the
way we work and say well where is the engineering and one of the great things about working at Lockheed Martin it taught me how to be an engineer they took their engineering methodologies and applied that to information technology whether it's programming or network engineering or systems architecture you approached it from an engineering perspective and lens so a combination of certification on the job experience college degrees have positioned me for where I'm at in my career today but what does that mean for you if you're looking
to make the decision on whether or not you're going to invest in certification formal education or both now I think that again it depends on where you're at in your career one of the great things about certification is that it can give get you kind of a quick boost it's one of those things that you can learn a very specific topic say how to configure and install cisco wireless networks to get you a job as a engineer that installs cisco wireless networks or void certification cisco
VoIP certification or vmware certified professional to install and to design and install and manage VMware networks those are great ways to specific specific skills get a specific job but when you talk about the death of knowledge needed to expand your career beyond just those single points you can either take the router you can continue to get certifications in adjacent technologies or you can go the route that I did which was to get a degree that not only taught me more about the theories of information technology
and technology in general but also armed me with the project management on skills the business the knowledge of business management accounting and then the soft skills of arts and social sciences that I use in my job every day so I see you know I don't see the the conversation or the debate as certification versus degree I see it as a combination of the two and it may be a matter of retiring I it took me six years to get my undergrad but during that time period
I kept getting certifications which allow allow me to continue to get roles within IT organizations doing i.t work and then eventually as I got to degree to open up additional doors for me to to have flexibility to either continue down that technical path or expand beyond the technical path and go towards more towards a management or business side of Technology and IT operations well that's it for this episode of ER slots each tech talk again I would love for you guys to follow us on twitter
at virtualized geek vision visit the site virtualbox keep calm and like the videos so i can keep them common again talk to you guys next week episode 29
