CIO.COM is suggesting in this article that IT certificates are mostly useless. Slashdot has a bit of discussion about it as well.

I believe there are a bunch of problems with how IT certificates and qualifications are being used, not that they are useless in all cases.

THe first issue that comes to mind is the large group of MCSE certified people who may have learned how to answer a bunch of questions, but are utterly clueless about the actual technology they are dealing with. (yes, there are also MCSEs out there who do know their stuff, I know)

A second issue is that the certificates that are around, mostly deal with specific products and not with the technology behind them. I seriously wonder what companies are trying to achieve by hiring people who have not in any possible way proven to udnerstand the technology and only have shown to be able to reproduce litteral knowledge from a book. Such a person will have knowledge that gets outdated as quick as the product (s)he is 'specialized' in.

It makes many people waste a lot of time and money. IT professionals waste their time on the certificates while not learning anything usefull and either those professionals or the companies they work for are wasting their money on not getting anything.

There have been certification programs in the past that did work, Novell's certified network engineer did mean somethign for a long time.

What sets such certificates apart?

For a NCE certification, you have to know things at two different levels:

Then, to obtain the certificate, you have to demonstrate understanding what you are doing, and you have to do so in practise. Yes, you also have to known all the details.

When you are looking for someone to operate the restarting of crashed windows machines, a MCSE will be what you are looking for. For a network expert that will last a few years longer then todays bit of 'hot' technology, I would go look somewhere else really, at least not have a MCSE certificate play any role of significance.

MCSE is not unique, and is likely not even the worst example of a certificate that has been devaulated completely. It is a good example however because there are a lot of people who have it, and it is a popular 'filter' when companies are recruting.

By using this filter, companies are filtering out the people who they need most, those who didn't go for the bullshit and instead went for things that actually work.

As long as the average MCSE can't explain things like for example the scaling limitations of a NAT implementation, they should definitely not be doing network infrastructure of any sort.