“Really?”, – you might think, “But who will be repairing the accountant’s computer?”
The thing is that system administrator is not interested in doing a low-skilled routine job day by day. When he or she loses motivation you lose a perfect result. Nothing is made good enough with no passion by making. Also, you need that your system administrator can not only install Windows but also make server configuration, and teach other employees, right? So what is the solution for having an “irregular” administrator? To grow admin’s skills.
A specialization certification is an option. For example, Cisco offers five levels of network certification: Entry, Associate, Professional, Expert and Architect, the highest level of accreditation within the Cisco Career Certification program. All certifications require passing one or more theoretical exams offered by Pearson VUE. CCIE certifications also require a hands-on exam administered at special labs around the world.
The technologies are developing, and dial-up and ADSL are being replaced by 10Gbit connections. That’s why manufacturer companies should release new certifications and admins are catching them up to be in trend. In Wikipedia we can see a giant list of retired certifications. But the indicative thing is that course basics are unchangeable: OSI models, TCP/IP, physical characteristics of signals.
Certification pros:
The standardization of learning process and ways of learning.
Increasing salary level of certificated employees.
Increasing competitiveness
Certification cons:
Certification is not always an indicator of employee’s competence because of examination dumps. It means that the examinee learns right answers by heart to pass an exam but it doesn’t give a fundamental understanding of the discipline.
The employer does not always understand how your CCNA certification could help his business that’s why he can decline participation in it.
Certification is often related to a specific brand, so in some way, it means you can professionally tighten only one kind of bolts.
The Diagram Shows the Dependence Between the Interest in Two Different Kinds of Certification
The second way of learning basics and drilling deeply in them is choosing valued and timeless disciplines. By knowing how to configure VTP in Cisco communicators the admin will not be able to work with others. But programming skill gives the ability to develop a program to configure any communicators quantity, and the programming language does not matter because of the language similarity.
In that case, there is a profit to business too:
1. You grow administrator’s skills and he appreciates it
2. There is no need to pay to retake the exam after a while because of basics timeless.
As a conclusion, I must say that a certificate is not a litmus paper, but it is a base that helps administrator build a well-rounded and highly marketable skill set.
We’ll be happy to help you get it off the ground!
