License To… Shiny Thing!*
BusinessPundit has a post reacting to the notion that managers ought to be licensed or certified.
Since I am opposed to all occupational licensing, I consider the idea patently absurd, and the comments to the post fall along the same lines.
Private certifications are different, in that individuals can obtain them or not, employers can seek people who have them or not, and they can be worth the paper they’re printed on or not. For computer-related certs, all too often they are not worth what you might expect. The experience and greater background of the individual makes the certification they hold in this or that valuable, not the other way around.
What good is an MCSE who has no grasp of troubleshooting, limited hands-on experience, and who did nothing more than cram and pass a test after become enamoured of the idea of getting the cert, or the idea of getting into a field to which the cert would appear to be a golden ticket? Not much. And what good is someone who only has knowledge of the latest and greatest, on paper or otherwise, when it comes time to work on something even slightly dated that is unfamiliar?
Someone can be licensed, certified, and stamped with the full force of the wider world’s approval, and still be unethical, incompetent, or not right for a specific job or company. All licensing does is create artificial market conditions.
* This is an inside joke about a lousy manager at my previous job, who was known as “Shiny Thing” because he was easily distracted that way, as well as only focusing on the shiny things and not the substance.
Licenses are nothing but a way for the state to make money off peoples’ need to make a living. I worked as a part-time customer service rep at an insurance company. This meant I plugged numbers and letters into software to get insurance quotes for people. In Florida you have to be licensed to do this. For this my boss had to pay about six hundred dollars, for a three-day, 8-hour class I had to take, and then the licensing fee. And I wasn’t even a manager; I was just doing this part time to pay rent while I went to college.
Posted by Andrea Harris on 02/23 at 08:53 PMI pursued an MCSE for a while. It was just as well for me that M$ historied the NT4 program when I was halfway thru it. The real benefit for me was that the program put me in touch with a staffing firm who randomly assigned me to an employer who appreciated my troubleshooting skills and hands-on experience. I wonder where all those people who memorized the braindumps are now.
Posted by triticale on 02/24 at 01:31 AM
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