Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Why isn't getting certified like getting a drivers license?

When I posted the other day about certification, I was being honest, it will bring us quite a bit of money, especially when we are done with them all over the next couple weeks, but I still don't like the whole idea.

While discussing this with a few people the idea that one studies for the exam, using whatever mock exam tools there are and then passes the exam seems to be a bit pointless.

Yes, I know, there are customers who expect it or demand it and some people that really believe in it, I'm just not one of those people. Never have, never will.

If you are an experienced individual and are taking the exams to set yourself apart from others, or even from within your own organization, that is a valid reason. After all if it will help you get a raise or promotion or a better job, why not?

If you are not very experienced or worse, have none, and you take the exams and then put yourself out as a Lotus or other product expert I have major issues with this.

And these types of people are out there, more and more, although it seems like they are almost all Windows Server or Exchange admins.

In my case I have never wanted to get certified. Aside from a handful of projects over the last 18 years or so, I can not say having any certs or not having any has mattered one bit. In fact, I missed more projects(and sometimes training events) because of religion related issues.

IBM and other vendors want to put forth their best foot forward, proud that they have gold level or whatever type of Business Partners. I don't blame them, but does it make a difference to the customers? Sure in some types of organizations, but in general no customer we were engaged with any projects ever stopped to ask me what we are certified in or when. So if our certs were for Lotus Connections, yet we are working on a Quickr project should or would that disqualify us? We hope not, but we have numerous Quickr projects to back up our work and knowledge.

Having certs or every cert does not make the partner. It may in IBM's eyes, but projects are not won on certs, they are won on relationships and the ability to actually talk to the customer on their level about the business, the technology and the future. No cert can provide that, nor can it ensure that the partner you are working with is honest and open about what they know or don't know or if they are going to pull a Microsoft Partner line and hit you up for money when you are deep in problems.

Unlike a driver's license, which one truly must pass in a live automobile on a real road sometimes in horrible weather, a paper or electronic test that does not involve real live workings or products just doesn't have that same authenticity to me, sorry I am just from the old school where "Getting Things Done" meant "Doing It Yourself" (hopefully with your team), not sitting back and saying you have a degree or a cert or don't get paid to "do" that work.

Save the server from crashing, produce an application using only 13 Lotuscript functions (and if it isn't possible be able to explain why or what is needed to accomplish the task), build a working LDAP environment, push out email to only one group of people, some of which no longer exist and where do they go if they don't exist? Active, realistic testing is much more important because this person being interviewed may or may not need to bother you at 3 in the morning sometimes.

The problem is unless you interview this way, you can not hire good people either. I generally do not interview people with certs that make no sense from their resume or the job being applied for. I can't put someone in front of a computer and say, fix it or do it. But I do ask open ended questions around issues that can appear. To be fair, I pick some from my blog posts to see how much research prospects do.

To all those who worked hard to get their certs through the years, I am jealous of you all. You did it when it really meant something to have it, or so it seemed to me.

Maybe if I had been thinking about it differently over the years I would have done it sooner, then again as I am a horrible test taker(something about always seeing a different opinion of what I am reading) I was a self fulfilling prophecy.

For now I am happy we meet the requirements and will continue to do so as long as we are an IBM Business Partner.


  1. If you have been working in the field for the certification then it isn't too bad.

    The Appdev stuff for me up until the last exam was a doddle. The R8 upgrade exam was long and did require a bit more study (as it was new) but looking back the questions are not that hard anymore.

    Admin on the other hand is not an area I would be as strong as, so I am still studying to bring my certs up to date. Not an area I am a fan of :) so the learning is a bit longer.

  2. I haven't been certified in years. Just seems pointless to me. It seemed to be more memorization of key points. Maybe that has now changed but in my current situation, there is no need.

    I do remember back in R4 when I took the instructor exam, that was closer to real world work. Build an app, troubleshoot administration issues and you really need to know your stuff. When teaching, you needed to know the how and why, not just be able to spit out a few buzz words and get by.

  3. I partially agree with this -

    There are some people out there selling themselves as experts because they got a certification by only reading the book. I know the IBM Certification team is changing this and is making the exams more and more hard to pass since the questions are becoming more experience based. Just take a look to Connections 2.5 and Sametime 8.5

    But certifications can actually help you to get a project or get a job - the other day while talking to our Recruiter he said if there are 2 candidates with similar experience, the one with the certifications might have more chances to get the job since it shows that is taking time to learn and to make sure is on top of the technology and have a Company certifying that.

    And as a Consulting company, it is all based on networking, referral and all projects that you have done in the past that will make a difference - but again - some CxO truly believe in certifications so is more the benefit than the harm to be certified. 2 companies offering the same experience and the same number of great projects done in the past - would be a tough battle - but having more certified consultants on one side could help to be the first option.

  4. @Simon, if you want it all it can be hard, but as an admin I would never try to take an appdev cert, it would be like me taking an exam in Chinese.

    @Denny,Funny you mention the training exam as that was my next goal, for the company, we need someone certified to train and since I usually do the trainings anyway, I was nominated. Nice to know it was and hopefully is more like the hands on side.

    @Luis, naturally I do not side with the recruiter on their perspective. No one's cert says I paid for this or I spent hours, days in training for it or my company paid for it. Some people are lucky enough to have employers that want them to get it and encourage it, everyone should but these days I don't think it is as common as it was once upon a time.

    Perhaps certs mean more for admins than devs because a dev can show their work?

  5. I too partially agree.

    I am with the controlled distribution. I saw many unhappy and angry customers of poor implemented projects because of unskilled partners involved. Unfortunately they don't just give up the partner, but also product. A couple of Lotus Workflow and portal account has been lost to microsoft because of unskilled implementation.

    Partners must be certified about their technical skills. IBM used 'selling' restriction to accomplish certification.

    But you are right, there are serious problems.

    First, certification became a business. Training, exams, tests, etc. A standard business partner with a small team should have 20-30K budget to keep up its level. Self-education is only available for technical sales.

    Second, quality of certification exams are very low. Questions are irrelevant with the real life. They are asking the name of .exe file of quickr connector installer in Lotus Quickr exam. I am upgrading Domino for 10 years, accomplished tens of large deployments but still don't know command line parameters of convert task for which they are asking...

    Now I am trying to get SS&UC SVP certificates. I failed the first exam, Quickr for Domino, will retake next week. I don't know and never installed it before. I just had a technical sales workshop, used greenhouse and read some pdf's and got %69/%75 at the first exam.

    I should not be able to pass that exam!

  6. @Serdar, careful what you write about the exams, you did sign a document saying what is on the exam stays on the exam and you will not divulge any questions.
    That said, yes if one could pass an exam without doing anything that would be too easy. However my thought was since the questions ask more esoteric information or information which quite honestly I would not think about, as you eluded to, then yes it's a problem.
    If you got some training at the workshop and can read the manual and have an excellent memory you could pass it.
    I do not have an excellent memory and thus blogging saves me some times ;-)

  7. I know that agreement :))) So I did not give real examples. The first question is from a free sample test and the second is a distorted version of reality :)))

    But I can assure you they are absoultely similar for all kinds of exams. It is a matter of how much tricks you had before the exam.

    I don't know if other countries are similar, but turning certification issue into a business is not a good idea. In Turkey, Microsoft did it once, a decade ago. They pushed certification necessity into market, enlarged education coverage. Lots of companies became authorized educators and they got high school students and tried to convert them to .net developers.

    Of course it is not possible. It failed because lots of unqualified, unskilled and easily-certified people emerged.

  8. That happened in Venezuela too. When I was about o finish college, my University became Microsoft Campus or something and gave .Net o whatever it was by then and allowed the students to play with their tools for free (hope IBM is listening)

    And started providing Certification Training. The only problem was, everybody became Visual Basic "experts" and market got saturated.

  9. @Luis and @Serdar, yes it can backfire or have unintended consequences.
    IBM could provide colleges with Rational or J2EE abilities which will serve them better in the future.
    Maybe they do, I have no idea.

  10. Keith, on the Domino development side, I'd argue that certifications have actually become more meaningful over time because of a shift in the types of questions. Without giving away any specifics, back in the R4 days, a typical question was what tab of the InfoBox some setting was on; conversely, the last time I took a cert exam, it was actually asking questions about which of several programming techniques was best practice.

    In other words, if I'd taken the more recent test my rookie year, I wouldn't have passed it because I didn't know what I was doing back then; but if I were to take the R4 tests today, I probably wouldn't pass them because they focused on things that are just "muscle memory" now... when I'm developing an app, I know where to click to set each property, but I couldn't regurgitate that for you in an exam because I've been doing it so long I don't even think about it any more... I just do it.

    I guess my point is that a developer who's passed the newer exams is at least more likely to understand the "hows" (if not the "whys"). That's certainly no measurement of work ethic, honesty, communication skills, etc., but at least there's a likelihood that they grasp some of the underlying concepts. But is that piece of paper enough to base a hiring decision on? Definitely not. Neither is a resume, or even a degree... as you mentioned, that's why the interview process is crucial.

  11. @Tim, thanks for that information. It does enlighten me a bit on the other side.
    Maybe cert exams are slowly getting to terms with a new reality.
    Hope so.
    Best practices would be nice on the admin side but it seems the people who wrote the tests didn't think about it. Though to be fair there are a few ways to accomplish a task with Domino so it's not easy.
    I wonder what we could all crowdsource a cert exam to be like? That could prove to be interesting perhaps to IBM Education.