Certification has been a big issue for a long time. When companies
like Microsoft started with the admin certification and Sun followed
with Solaris certification, the credentials meant real dollars for
someone who went through the certification process. Some
certifications, like the security certification suite, require
substantial industry experience and thousands of dollars of courseware
before you can take the exam. Most people that I know who obtain
certification are consultants or work for resellers. Most software
companies require that their resellers have a minimum of one certified
engineer to support the sales staff. Not a bad idea but it dosen’t
always work that way. I worked for years for Sun Microsystems and was
the Solaris area specialist as well as author for the company facing
web pages used by sales and marketing. My exposure to customer issues,
experience in administering the office computers, and desire to read
everything published on Solaris gave me the credibility and knowledge
required to talk about the operating system. I didn’t really learn much
of my administration skills through the courseware prep books or the
online documentation. What really helped me learn the internals and
knobs to tweak was benchmarking systems. It dosen’t take a rocket
scientist to configure a printer on a system and create a spool that
can be used by Windows clients. It is a little more difficult if you
are trying to run the SPECWeb benchmark and get 5% more performance
from the disk sub-system so that you can be the lowest bidder on a
government contract that could mean millions in sales.
what are the key reasons to be certified? Looking at the comments the key reasons are:
1) advantage over co-workers, you can prove that you are smarter than they are
2) increase employability, headhunters are looking for keywords to match someone with a potential employer
3) certification broadens knowledge, yes. these tests to delve into
the fringe stuff that no one ever really does in real life. At times,
these fringe topics are relevant but in my opinion, not very often.
4) helps develop language to talk with DBA. I totally agree with
this one. Learning the language is key to working in the industry.
In the next few weeks I am going to walk through the admin workshops
(parts one and two) and take the certification exams. I will summarize
in the next few weeks what I gathered from this training. My goal is to
understand the lingo required to talk to a DBA and the management team
involved in database selection. My objective will be to obtain the
certified associate and certified professional. I would like to get the
master ranking but I think that it requires 3-4 years working as a DBA
which I don’t have.
– Insiders guide to Oracle Certification
– Certification Information (from outside of Oracle)