IT certification and training

Cisco certification product giveaway winners

Congratulations to our Cisco certification product giveaway winners:

• Sailingswede
• Kuroiinu
• ITM
• Jimbarino
• Mukul
• Smasiello
• Maji
• Indytex1
• Criggl001
• B3nny0

And thank you all for participating! You may have noticed that two extra winners made the list. This was because SearchNetworking.com’s IT career and training expert, Ed Tittel, wanted to pitch in the two extra CCENT 640-822 Network Simulators left over from his previous contest: Cisco Press Supplies the Prizes, I Decide Who Gets Them!

Like his previous contest, Ed got to decide who our contest winners were. If you’d like to know how he decided, here was his method and message to all seeking certification:

Dear contestants,

I alphabetized the list of names, then rolled dice to randomly walk the list of unselected names to pick the winners. If you don’t like the results, please rail against the laws of probability, not me!

What I noticed in the commentary from everybody is a renewed focus on the technical side of work, and a desire to improve upon your skills and knowledge bases. If you keep this up, it may not make much difference in the short run while our economic crisis works its way through the financial and other systems. But in the long run, self-improvement nearly always leads to improved employment situations and circumstances as well. Good luck with your exams, and with your career development paths.

Best wishes,
Ed Tittel

Cisco certification product giveaway

In light of Cisco’s Unified Computing announcement — and to coincide with the wrap-up of IT career and training expert Ed Tittel’s Cisco Press giveaway, we thought now would be the perfect time to run yet another Cisco certification contest. In the event you missed Ed’s contest, there is still time (until April 1) to redeem yourself.

As it is the first day of spring, SearchNetworking.com would love to spring for your certification training material to help you in these tough economic times.

What type of material, you ask?

Six CCENT 640-822 Network Simulators

Two CCNA Security 640-553 Cert Flash Cards Online

Since these network simulators and flashcards are online, this means we can finally open up our contest to SearchNetworking.com members outside of the United States!

As IT Career JumpStart blogger, Ed Tittel, writes In today’s job market, prospective employers want it all:

An abundance of candidates to choose from means that employers can become extremely selective about whom they’ll bring on board to fill open positions…That means advanced degrees, serious certifications, and lots of direct relevant experience are what it takes to get through the door and on board these days.

If you find yourself lacking in any of these areas, now’s the time to go to school, keep working (or volunteering if you don’t have work), and start adding certifications to your resume. And we would like to do everything in our power to aid you with the certification process.

If you can follow these two steps, you can qualify to win the Cisco certification product of your choosing.

First: Post to our blog (by clicking on the “comment” link at the bottom of this post) with responses to the following 5 questions:

1. What is your job title (if you are a student or not working just write “full-time student” or “unemployed”)?
2. If applicable, what type of business do you work for?
3. What TechTarget websites do you use?
4. What do you use that site for?
5. What are your biggest work-related challenges?

Second: After you post your entry, send us an email so that we can contact you if you win. Make sure to include:

1. Your blog comment username
2. Your exam of interest (either the 640-822 or 640-553, but not both, please)

We’re giving you until midnight of April 1 to respond. Contest winners will be chosen by Ed Tittel who will guest post for us on April 2 with the contest results.

Good luck to all, and thanks for participating!

Microsoft offers free certification exam retake

Can’t afford to get certified? Well, these days, with an even more competitive job market, you can’t afford not to be.

The good news is that Microsoft is giving you two incentives to certify for their exams. Through Second Shot, you get to retake your Microsoft certification exam for free if you don’t pass on your first try.

If you’ve mastered the test on your first try, then you get 25% off your next exam that you decide to take.

All you have to do is register for Microsoft’s Second Shot offer by December 31, 2008. Details can be found on their website (in cased you missed the link above): http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/offers/secondshot/default.mspx

If you need that little extra nudge, think of it this way: Those who have higher credentials, especially of the expert levels, get higher pay. If you want to be Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) certified, for example, you need to pass about seven exams altogether. Each one costs $125 through Prometric, so if this seems steep now, think of the payoff later down the line with your new starting salary!

If MCSE isn’t the exam for you, take a look at this newtorking certification guide from our career and training expert, Ed Tittel, to get a taste of the certification landscape. If you need some certification or career training advice, feel free to check out Ed Tittel’s expert section or ask Ed your own career question to guide you in your work ahead.

Cisco certifications aren’t what they used to be

We knew the economy was bad, but did Cisco really have to drop their impressive medallions for plastic plaques?

Arden Packeer, CCIE 20716, blogged the run up to his CCIE: Routing & Switching exam, posting tutorials and regular progress updates as he went. After months of preparation, he posted that he was “deliriously happy” when he finally passed.

Two days ago, when he received his certification by mail, those feelings were slightly less warm:

Seriously, Cisco, the new CCIE Plaques suck!

We pay $1400 a pop for the Exam (not to mention countless hours of blood sweat and tears), surely Cisco can make the prize at the end a little better than this!

Compare Arden’s plaque:

and the older medallion style, courtesy Greg Ferro’s blog, Ethereal Mind:

We can sympathize with Arden, but apparently he’s a few years too late to rock the medallion. We asked Peter Koht, who works with Learning@Cisco’s public relations, if the older models were still available, and this was his response:

Hi Michael,

According to the folks I asked over at Cisco, the original CCIE award/plaque was a medallion at the
end of a ribbon in a shadow box format.

This was retired out at least 5 years ago and replaced with the plaque, which is on it’s second iteration.

The medallion is no longer offered.

Hope that helps

Best,
Peter

Sorry Arden, but maybe a petition can get Cisco to change their mind. Think of all the great publicity certifications would get if people started wearing their medallions when they went out? Maybe there could even be some product placement with Mr. T: Imagine him adding some CCIE bling and shouting, “I pity the fool who don’t know Cisco.” I think it could be a win-win all around, and would help give those hard-working Cisco studs the recognition they deserve.

Further Reading:

• Another CCIE vents about the plaque, but doesn’t get a Cisco response.
• CCIE still worth it, even with no medallion? Read SearchNetworking’s Certification Guide
  
• Contact Mr. T’s booking agents

Have Cisco pay YOU for a change

After all the money you’ve diverted from your (enterprise’s) coffers, don’t you deserve a little something back? I mean, your requisition orders must pay the salaries of at least a few marketing types, sales types, and even a few engineers, so a kick back is the least they could give you.

Well, you’ve got your chance as Cisco continues moving from providing dumb pipes to selling services and solutions. BusinessWeek has the scoop on Cisco’s I-Prize contest, which will award $250,000 to a team of innovators and entrepreneurs for their idea, with up to $10 million in funding set aside to potentially staff, develop, and market a business based on the idea.

If you’re sick of ho-hum tasks and pointy-haired bosses, this could be your ticket out. And while entries are closed for this year’s contest, there’s always next year or one of dozens of similar contests, as Business Week reports:

Cisco’s innovation contest is one of at least a dozen corporate-sponsored competitions that have cropped up in recent years, all aimed at developing and rewarding innovation. Microsoft (MSFT), for instance, annually awards its $25,000 Imagine Cup to a student team that best uses technology to solve a real-world problem. Using money to reward technological innovation is hardly novel; historians say one of the first innovation prizes dates to 1714, when the British government offered £20,000 to the person who could devise a method for determining a ship’s longitude. (The prize was officially awarded 59 years later.)

Hey, if a Canadian steamfitter and a German student assistant can make it to finalist status, what’s stopping you? If you’re not quite ready for that 180 degree career change, there are other opportunities to give your networking career a jolt.

One quick method: Enter to win Cisco Press’ CCNA Official Exam Certification Library. We’ve got 10 copies to give away to 10 lucky readers. See contest details for a chance to win.

Internetwork Expert is sponsoring a Real CCIE’s, Real People 2008 Scholarship, where the winners (one U.S. and one international award will be given) will receive:

• CCIE Self-Paced End-to-End Program
• Complete CCIE Rack Rental package compliments of Graded Labs
• Onsite Bootcamp of the recipients choice (including airfare, hotel, provisions, and ground transportation).

Not bad, but hurry up: The contest is over in 3 days!

Further Reading:

• Cisco’s I-Prize homepage
• Real CCIE’s, Real People 2008 Scholarship, via CCIE Pursuit
• SearchNetworking.com’s career news and tips landing page

Outsourced and automated network skills: Is it the end of the keyboard cowboy?

Aside from Angelina Jolie, the movie Hackers just didn’t have a whole lot of redeeming factors if you took it too seriously: overwrought dialog, an improbable eco-terrorism plot, and CGI “hacking” visualizations to make the most neophyte CCNA blush. It definitely has its cult appeal, though, because it captured the romance of tinkering with complex systems that normal people just don’t understand, whether that’s Zero Cool taking over a television station programming or the local networking guru keeping the server humming along against all odds.

True networking admins just aren’t like other people: They understand how to coax every bit of juice out of hardware, how to manually configure every last detail through the command line, and how, almost magically, to fix problems they don’t even quite understand. And that kind of knowledge didn’t come overnight, but after years of training and just plain practical experience.

Those skills, long prerequisite to successful IT, might soon be obsolete.

So says Rob Whiteley of Forrester. Command-line mastery is on its way out in the near future. “It’s pretty much being outsourced,” he said. “If you don’t outsource it, you can probably find a tool to automate it for you.” Instead, Rob said, IT shops need professionals who can digest higher-level views of security, network management and network architecture. Unfortunately, Rob said, the colleges and certification programs are still living in a command-line world and are only slowly catching up.

Don’t trust an analyst’s word? I also spoke with Steven Ostrowski, spokesperson for the Computing Technology Industry Association. In our interview, which I’ll write about more next week on SearchNetworking, he said technical skills alone were no longer cutting it.

“There are jobs out there for the people who have a combination of technical skills, business skills and communication skills,” he said. “But the tech guys have to understand what the considerations are.”

That being said, just because things are changing doesn’t mean everyone agrees IT is dead. As 5- and 10-year-old technologies are now being standardized, outsourced, or automated, the creation of new IT demands hasn’t ceased: VoIP, video, and NAC are just the beginning, and the pace of innovation isn’t about to dry up. IT professionals will always have to be there to determine which technology can deliver real enterprise benefit, and how it can best achieve that benefit. As long as there is technological innovation, there will be IT … even if they’re not the roguish keyboard cowboys they used to be.

Cisco to add a job-matching service

Cisco certifications recently reached 1 million but long-time rumors of the program starting an official job matching service may be actualized this summer.

In an interview conducted by news writer Michael Morisy, Fred Weiller, director of switching product and solutions marketing at Cisco intimated that “they were working on an official Cisco career marketplace to match certified professionals with jobs.”

With all the talk of having to survive a recession in the IT industry (whether or not we’re actually in one is entirely debatable), extra job-support programs may be the perfect answer.

If you look at some of Cisco’s existing sites, however, it seems they’ve already provided quite the gamut of career-excelling resources: Take, for example, Cisco’s career resources page or their Career Connection center which “seeks to link Networking Academy students and graduates with employers who are looking for job-ready IT and Networking candidates.” Cisco’s Digital Divide Best Practices Web page features job search strategies for entry-level students and more.

What might separate these resources from Cisco’s “official” job matching service? Should we expect to see a Dice or Monster-like site from Cisco? And what should people do in the interim (besides visit the previously mentioned sites)?

We see the questions in our SearchNetworking.com editor’s inbox every other day: Is it better to get a certification or to get experience? Should I get educated or certified? Even though certification, education and experience all work toward the same goals — doing one seems to prevent you from performing the other; When future IT pros make their way through a higher education program, the requirements of the learning institution can supersede certification goals — and when current IT pros aspire to earn certifications or degrees, many times their employment obligations sap valuable time and energy away from pursuing further education.

To combine all three facets in your job-seeking path, IT training and certification expert Ed Tittel mentions this: “The best thing you can do for yourself … is to get into a degree plan where you also earn certifications on your way to an AA or BA in an IT discipline of some kind. Many programs include such options or requirements nowadays, and will give you the best of both worlds.”

Now if those certifications you decide to go into are of the Cisco persuasion, you can kill three birds with one stone, as they might help you find the job opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

Don’t let your job get shipped away

Despite the occasional peril of lost connectivity, it’s a fact of modern business that more and more services are being sent overseas. Once primarily for application development and call centers, outsourcers are enroaching increasingly closer and closer to the heart of businesses. Over on IT Knowledge Exchange, several SMB-types discussed outsourcing their entire IT departments.

Fortunately, there are some things savvy networking pros can do to make themselves “strategic assets” (HR speak for “not outsourcable”) rather than “commodity services” (that’s a bad thing). We’ve got a more in-depth look up at SearchNetworking, but here are some tips boiled down from my conversations with IT veterans, analysts, and even an outsourcing company’s HR specialist:

• Those with purchasing power are less likely to be cut. If you’re buying something, it’s a good sign you understand the business needs on a higher level, and that you know how to …
• Think strategically. If what you’re absolutely great at is properly configuring routers or securing a VPN, guess what? So are a lot of other people, and often times they can do it halfway around the world just as easily. What they can’t do is look around your business and suggest ways to cut down on communication problems between sales and the warehouse.
• If you specialize, make sure your field is not going away anytime soon, and define your specialization broadly enough to be flexible in case the winds change. That means taking a hard look at the theory behind, for example, VoIP management techniques rather than simply learning how to install and maintain one brand of bandwidth management appliances.
• Don’t rely on certifications alone. As the HR specialist told us, it’s just as easy to get certified in India as it is in the States, and labor is still cheaper there.
• Don’t forget soft skills. Part of being an effective networking strategist means working with — and learning from — others outside of your domain. Leadership and communications courses can help you not only freshen up your resume, but also work more effectively outside of IT.

There’s also some really great advice in in the ITKE forums, and if you’ve got a question about what to do with your own career, you might try asking there: Generally the members are more than willing to help out, and many of SearchNetworking’s resident expert tipsters are active participants. Some career-oriented posts I came across:

• How do I become an ICT professional?
• How do I get into IT with my administrative background?
• Certification in Business and Personal communications
• Advice on advancing a networking career

You mean I won’t get paid more for getting this cert?

Tell me you haven’t heard this before: Getting a certification earns you more pay. This week, however, Foote Partners LLC released a study revealing just the reverse: the average premium pay for uncertified workers trumps those who are certified. They have seen the average premium pay for uncertified workers increase 8% and decrease 2.3% for certified engineers in the past year.

I sat down with cofounder and CEO of Foote Partners LLC’s David Foote a few weeks ago to discuss the value of networking certifications in the job market. At that point in time, statistics for non-certified versus certified IT worker base pay percentage had just come to a head. Foote saw that managers were just beginning to look more at the skills IT professionals had to offer over the certifications they had obtained. In light of these new statistics, we’re really seeing results of this statement now. In less than a month we’ve seen a huge difference in how certifications are viewed.

“Part of the reason for this is the steady convergence of IT and business as, quite clearly, the design and delivery of products and services is heavily enabled by technology,” Foote stated in his report. New technology has always lead to new specialized jobs (think IT engineers). With the rapid rate the tech industry evolves at, it should come as no surprise that the IT job market would follow suit. To paraphrase Foote’s words, the toll that skill certifications are taking is just a drop in the bucket of changes we will see in the industry as a whole.

“IT professionals today have to be routinely knowledgeable about a whole lot of things that have to do with their employers’ industry, customers, and products–enough to take a strategic as well as tactical role in growing the business,” Foote said. But is it possible for IT to be completely converged in the business? Foote Partners LLC found that managers are most likely to hire IT pros with superior business skills, over IT pros with superior tech skills.

Does a decrease in pay for certified engineers mean that the workforce will start to see less-knowledgeable workers? IT guys and gals constantly juggle between certifying, schooling and getting work experience, and it finally seems that work experience is more valuable to managers. We can hopefully see experienced IT workers getting the recognition they deserve. No more struggling to prove their skills on paper; no more sacrificing work experience to chase down a certification.

Will this mean certifications will no longer exist? Should you request a refund of your Cisco training camp check? Not entirely. For one, Foote says “The Department of Defense has made [the decision to make]* certification a condition of employment,” meaning, once this goes through, The Department of Defense Directive 8570 will only hire security workers that have security certifications. So if you plan on helping Uncle Sam’s security sector five years from now, these stats won’t mean a great deal.

What else should you expect to see? Foote Partners LLC says that “the IT career ladder has been replaced by meandering career paths that span business functions and enterprises.” So rather than a rigid, one-way climb, think more about moving up, diagonally and across a jungle-gym rope ladder.

*The Department of Defense Directive 8570 is not mandating certifications for another five years.