[YLUG] Re:Test/Certification centre reccomendations ?

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Thu, 2006-09-07 at 11:27 +0100, Pete Fenelon wrote:
> Historically the only vendor qualifications that I ever had any
> respect for were CCIE (Cisco - most of the others didn't have much
> rigour to them) and Master CNE (Novell). Anyone who gets through those
> has to have some real intelligence and application domain knowledge as
> well as the ability to regurgitate the course books.

The information I saw on the RHCE content and method a few years back
led me to give it a significant amount of credence.  I was less
impressed by what I saw in the LPI course materiel a few years back (I
see the newer books on LPI are at least 4 times the size of the old one
- however memorising a phone book does not appear to be a good criteria
to me (unless you are going to work for directory enquiries)).

However I have not looked at either course within the last 2 years, and
things may have changed (I would be surprised if they hadn't).

I don't tend to get involved in recruiting now (mainly because the
department has had pretty stable staff for several years), however if I
was evaluating then RHCE/LPI may well improve your chances in the first
level of filtering (ie before interview) but after that it would make
almost zero difference.  In any case actually reading the information on
the job that is being recruited would normally make much more difference
to your changes of getting to interview - people (or worse agencies) who
have absolutely no idea what the company is or whats being recruited but
just spam us immediately remove themselves from consideration.

I would point out that I have a complete set of Solaris and Sun
Enterprise certifications (although some have probably expired now)
which I obtained without having touched Solaris since 1995 and took
following a couple of hours skimming the course material.  But them I am
good at exam technique - especially multiple choice stuff.  [The Solaris
exams also appeared to have significant stress on their coverage of
sendmail and the lp subsystem - both of which I remove from any Unix
system I administer as one of the first things I do].

[this seems to be more of a rant than originally intended - but its
cathartic]

	Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]