Certifications

It was a happy surprise to find a topic I find quite interesting: Certifications .... around here one of the biggest issues is getting 'good anything'... good books take ages to get delivered and are expensive for most of us, good labs are non existent, good training schools and trainers are arguably the biggest barrier to quality techies and certifications. I had to travel to Dubai for my mpls class, cisco trainers/training schools don't exist here for professional level certs and MPLS was too new for me at the time to start going through books...I needed things explained...

The internet,PDF's, torrents and travelling friends have to some extent filled a gap by bringing in the materials necessary, dynamips has sort of filled the lab gap, some companies like the one I work for actually allow you to order books for a library/resource center that you can then borrow from, and as luck would have it I can whip up a rack on short notice in the office and to some extent at home.... but the demand is still quite high, and not everyone has the same privileges. Every once in a while I run prospective certificate holders through technologies they might find difficult to understand that I do, It makes me feel better especially if they go on to achieve whatever they wanted.

But as everyone goes chasing certifications, here are a few posts that might be worth looking through, I especially like the ones asking you to push on, persevere, share the knowledge you learn and best of all enjoy your certification journey:

Most if not all come from Ivan Pepelnjak's blog:

1. How much knowledge will I gain by studying for a certification?
2. Knowledge or recipes?
3. Certifications: A new barrier to entry?
4. How well does Cisco’s certification training map to my actual network?

and before I forget we have Greg Ferro 's certification matters : This was a series of articles that helped pass a really dull morning at work and was for me quite thought provoking...

here's all the links

1. certification matters -- grab some coffee, start from the first one, go through them all.
2. Musing: On Permananent and Ephemeral Knowledge and Exam Study
3. Musing: On Reading and Learning From a Computer Screen

well for me, I've really enjoyed my journey thus far, and I decided to take one more cisco cert next year and a juniper one (if the discounted offer carries on:-)) for reasons outlined earlier....happy holidays....