IT Certifications and What They Are Really Worth

Sunday, 21:30, at a kitchen table. Dana has been on the desk at Stonebridge Insurance for three years and has four browser tabs open. The first is the syllabus for a networking fundamentals certification. The next is a training company's page promising a career in infrastructure. Then comes a forum thread in which forty strangers disagree about whether the certification is worth anything. Last is the exam booking page, which has a fee on it. Her colleague Raj holds three certifications. Raj is still on the desk. The sysadmin at Stonebridge holds none and has never been asked about it. Dana closes the booking tab, then reopens it, which is the whole question in one gesture.

A certification is a pass on a test, set by a vendor or an industry body, covering a published syllabus, taken on a particular day. That is all it certifies: that on that day you knew that syllabus well enough to pass. It can be worth a great deal or very little depending on which door you are trying to open. The honest answer to "are they worth it?" is "which one, for which door, instead of what?". This article is part of our The Helpdesk-to-Sysadmin Ladder series. It describes certifications generically, because the names change, the syllabuses change and the article is meant to be true in five years. The three kinds it describes will still exist, whatever they are called by then.

This article covers what a certification actually certifies and the three kinds. Next come when a certification opens a door, when experience beats it, and what it costs in hours and in principle. Studying from the desk, the trap of collecting certificates, and how to talk about one in an interview follow. Then come a short war story and the certification decision sheet, in that order. The sheet is a one-page template to fill in before booking anything.

What a Certification Actually Certifies

A certification proves that you learned a vocabulary and a model. The vendor's entry-level certification proves you know the vendor's systems as the vendor describes them. The networking fundamentals certification proves you know what an address, a name, a route and a port are and how they fit together. The framework certification proves you know what the framework calls an incident, a problem and a change. Those are real things to know, and a technician who knows them reads tickets differently from one who does not. The certificate is honest about what it is. The advertising around it is less so.

What a certification does not prove is that you have ever changed anything real. It does not say that you have untangled a permission tree with a department waiting. It does not say you have renewed a certificate on a gateway with seventy people depending on it. Nor does it say you have written a change record before touching a server. Those are the things a sysadmin wants to know about, because they are the things that go wrong. No examination can test them, because the examination has no users. A syllabus is an optimistic document. It describes the vendor's systems as the vendor would like them to behave.

So the certificate and the experience are different evidence for different questions. "Do they know the vocabulary?" is answered by the certificate. "Can they be trusted near the server?" is answered by the ticket record, the runbooks and the change records. Those are what The Tickets That Teach Infrastructure is about building. The rest of this article is about which question the door you want to open is asking.

The Three Kinds

Certifications that matter to the ladder come in three kinds, and the kind matters more than the name. A vendor's entry-level certification covers one vendor's products, in that vendor's terms, at the level of someone who will administer them under supervision. A networking fundamentals certification covers how networks work, independent of any product. It is the one most often asked for in infrastructure roles because every system sits on a network. A framework certification covers a way of organising support and operations work, with its own vocabulary for incidents, problems, changes and service levels. The best-known framework's certification has an honest article of its own in Is ITIL Certification Worth It?. This article does not repeat it.

If you hold none and want infrastructure, the networking fundamentals kind is the one with the broadest value. That is because it is vendor-neutral and every infrastructure role sits on a network. If you want the desk lead role, the framework kind speaks that language. The vendor kind is worth holding when you can name the employer, or the kind of employer, whose door it opens, and not otherwise. Holding a vendor certification for a system your organisation does not run is like holding a key to a building you have never visited. It is not useless. It is just not a key to this building.

When a Certification Opens a Door

A certification opens a door when the person on the other side of it cannot see your work. The clearest case is the external move. An advertisement for a junior administrator role is read first by a screen, sometimes software and sometimes a person with forty CVs and ten minutes. The screen looks for words. The certificate is a word. Without it, a technician with three years of excellent ticket write-ups may never reach the interview where the write-ups would have won. With it, they reach the interview, and then the write-ups do the work. The certificate buys the conversation, not the job.

The second case is the field where you have no evidence yet. A technician may be on a desk with no sysadmin to shadow, no shared systems within reach, and no teaching tickets to volunteer for. That technician has nothing to put in the evidence column. A certification is a way of showing interest and vocabulary while the evidence is still impossible. It is a substitute for experience in exactly the situation where experience is not available. It should be replaced with experience as soon as experience is.

The third case is the employer who asks for it. Some employers hold contracts, partnerships or regulatory obligations that require a count of certified staff. Some have a development plan that includes a named certification and will pay for it. Some simply list it on every advertisement because the last person held it. In each of those cases the certification is the price of the door, and the question is only whether the door is worth the price. And the fourth case is the tie-breaker: two candidates with similar evidence, and one holds the networking fundamentals certification. It decides more interviews than anyone admits, because it is the easiest thing in the room to compare.

When Experience Beats It

Experience beats a certification whenever the person deciding can see your work, which means nearly every internal move and every interview conducted by a sysadmin rather than a screen. The sysadmin at Stonebridge has watched Dana map eleven groups on a permission tangle and write the change record before the rebuild. They have watched her produce a runbook that another technician used. That sysadmin does not need a certificate to know what Dana can do. A certificate would tell them nothing they have not already seen. A sysadmin asked to choose between a colleague with a runbook and a stranger with a certificate chooses the runbook, for the sound reason that runbooks are rarer.

The interview with a sysadmin works the same way, even at a new employer. Screens ask about words; sysadmins ask about changes. "Tell me about something you changed on a shared system and what happened." "Tell me about a time a fix broke something else." "What is in your change record?" Those questions are answered from the ticket record. A technician might bring two anonymised write-ups to the interview, one of a teaching ticket and one of a mistake. That technician answers the questions better than any syllabus could. Where the desk keeps a complete event history on every ticket, as QuerySolv does, the write-ups are there to be pulled. In any tool, keep your own copy of the ones that show your best work, with the names removed.

The honest opinion, then: for the internal move, a runbook beats a certificate every time. For the external move, the certificate gets you to the interview and the runbook gets you through it. A technician choosing between an evening of study and an evening writing up the print server rebuild should, in most cases, write up the rebuild. They should book the exam only when they can name the door. The hiring side of the same argument, including why aptitude and evidence outrank paper for a desk role, is in Aptitude Versus Experience.

What It Costs: Hours and Money, in Principle

Every certification costs three things: the exam fee, the study hours, and the renewal. Most certifications expire after some years and want either a new exam or evidence of continuing study to stay valid. The fee varies by certification and by place and this article names no figures. The study hours are the larger cost and the one nobody budgets. For a worked example, Dana estimated the networking fundamentals certification at somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty hours of study. She estimated that from the syllabus and a sample paper, and planned it as two evenings a week for four to five months. Those are her numbers for her certification and her starting knowledge, stated as an example rather than a rule. Yours will differ. The way to find them is the same: read the syllabus, sit a sample paper cold, and count the topics you got wrong.

Who pays depends on the employer and the contract. Many organisations will pay the fee for a certification that is on a written development plan. Some will pay for the study material too. Some attach a condition that the technician stays for a period or repays the fee. Whether that condition is enforceable, and what it covers, varies by place and by contract. So read yours and ask before signing. The way to ask is with the decision sheet from the end of this article filled in. It asks which certification, and which door it opens for the organisation as well as for you. It asks how many hours, when, and what the desk will have at the end. A manager asked for a fee says no. A manager asked to approve a plan with a fee in it says yes far more often, because the plan answers the question they were going to ask.

Count the renewal before booking the first exam. A certification that expires in a few years is a certification you will either pay to keep or let lapse. A lapsed certification on a CV invites the question of why. For the networking fundamentals kind, held once and renewed while it is useful, the cost is usually worth it. For a vendor certification in a system you no longer administer, letting it lapse is the right answer and nobody will mind. Certifications are not trophies. They are keys, and a key to a door you have stopped using is just something heavy in your pocket.

Studying From the Desk

The syllabus is a map of what to look for in the queue. Every topic on a networking fundamentals syllabus happens on a help desk somewhere in a normal month. There is the device with no address, the name that resolves to the wrong place, the route that is missing, and the port the firewall blocks. A technician studying from the desk reads the syllabus on Sunday. On Monday the technician takes the can't-connect ticket and works out which topic it is. That turns an abstract chapter into a thing that happened to a named user at 09:14. Study that way and the exam is easier, but that is the smaller benefit. The larger one is that the tickets become the evidence the certificate cannot be.

The dangerous topics, the ones that involve changing a shared system, are rehearsed in a lab and never on production. A home lab, meaning a couple of virtual machines on an ordinary computer, is enough to build a directory, break a permission tree and fix it. It is enough to set up a small network and route between two halves of it. All of this is without a user in sight. Use it for the parts of the syllabus the desk does not let you touch, and use the desk for the parts it does. And tell the sysadmin you are studying, in one sentence. That is because a sysadmin who knows you are learning networking will hand you the next gateway ticket with the logs open. That is better than any practice question.

The Trap: Collecting Certificates

The trap is the technician with six certifications and no change record. Raj has three and is studying for a fourth. Every one of them was easier to start than the permission tangle in the queue, because a syllabus is finite and the tangle is not. Studying is safe, measurable, and produces a certificate at the end. A teaching ticket is slow, risky, and produces a runbook that nobody will frame. So the certificate becomes the thing you do instead of the frightening ticket, and the CV grows while the evidence column stays empty. Interviewers notice. The question that finds it is "tell me about something you changed", and the answer, if there is no change record, is a description of a syllabus.

The test for whether a certification is a key or an avoidance is to name the door before booking. "This certification will get my CV past the screen for the junior administrator roles at employers that run this kind of system. Three of those employers have advertised this year, and I will sit it in the spring." That is a key. "It will look good" and "it can't hurt" are not doors, and a certification booked for either reason is usually the one that goes on the shelf. One certification with a door and a runbook beside it outweighs four without, and the hiring manager can tell the difference in a paragraph.

Talking About It in an Interview

Say what you hold, then say what you did with it, in that order and without adjectives. "I hold a networking fundamentals certification, and since taking it I have worked the connected-but-can't-reach-it tickets on our desk with the gateway logs open; here is a write-up of one, with the names removed." That sentence tells the interviewer the vocabulary is there and the vocabulary has been used, and it hands them something to read. A certificate presented alone invites the question of what came next. A certificate presented with the ticket it helped solve answers the question before it is asked.

If you hold none, say so plainly and move to the evidence. "I don't hold a certification yet; I've been building the experience first, and here is what I have changed, with the records." Interviewers conducted by sysadmins respect that answer. Interviewers who do not respect it were going to ask for the certificate anyway, which is useful information about the employer. If you hold one that has lapsed, say that too and why, in one sentence. Nobody is caught out by a lapsed certificate that the candidate mentioned first; people are caught out by the one the interviewer found.

And if the certification is a condition of the role, treat it as a project with a date rather than a barrier. "I don't hold it yet; the syllabus overlaps most of what I do now, I've sat a sample paper, and I'd expect to pass it within four months of starting." An employer who wants the certificate usually wants it held within a period, not on the first day. A candidate who has already read the syllabus has done the first week's work of that period. The development plan that would carry it, and how it fits beside the rest of a technician's growth, is the subject of Development Beyond the Desk.

A Short War Story: Three Certificates at Stonebridge Insurance

Raj spent eight months of evenings and the fees for three examinations, two of them paid from his own pocket. He spent them on a vendor's entry-level certification, a framework certification and a second vendor certification for a system Stonebridge Insurance did not run. Then he applied for the junior systems administrator vacancy that opened when the second sysadmin moved to another insurer. He lost it to Dana, who held one certification, the networking fundamentals kind, booked after she had worked the gateway tickets. She brought to the interview a permission-tangle write-up, a change record for the print server rebuild and a runbook another technician had used. The sysadmin on the panel asked both of them to describe a change they had made to a shared system and what had happened. Dana described the rebuild, and Raj, who had spent his evenings on syllabuses, described a module. The cost to Raj was eight months, the fees, and roughly a year's delay. The delay was because the next vacancy was that far off. He spent the first half of the wait studying for a fourth exam before anyone told him why he had lost. A certificate opens a door that experience walks through, and he had been collecting keys to buildings he had never entered.

The Certification Decision Sheet

The decision sheet is one page, filled in before booking anything. It asks the questions in the order they matter: which door, which kind, and what the evidence column already holds. Next come what it will cost in hours and who pays. Then comes what you will do instead if the answer is "not yet". Fill it in honestly and most certifications you were going to book out of anxiety will fail at the first question, which is the sheet doing its job. The ones that pass are the ones worth paying for. The completed sheet is the document to put in front of a manager when asking for the fee. That is because it is the plan they would otherwise have asked you to write.

THE CERTIFICATION DECISION SHEET — BEFORE YOU BOOK
Name: ______________________   Date: ____________   Discussed with: ______________________

1. THE DOOR
   The role or move this is for: ____________________________________________
   Who decides, and can they see my work?    [ ] a screen / HR   [ ] a sysadmin or manager who knows my work
   If they can see my work, what would this add that the ticket record does not?  ____________________
   The employer or kind of employer that asks for it by name: ______________________________

2. THE KIND
   [ ] a vendor's entry-level certification (the vendor's systems run here?  yes / no)
   [ ] a networking fundamentals certification
   [ ] a framework certification (for a desk lead or service desk role?  yes / no)
   Expiry / renewal: every ____ years, by  [ ] re-examination  [ ] continuing study

3. THE EVIDENCE I ALREADY HAVE (ticket numbers, runbooks, change records)
   Related work I can show today: __________________________________________
   Related work I cannot get on this desk (the gap the certificate fills): __________________

4. THE COST
   Study hours estimated (syllabus read, sample paper sat, wrong topics counted): ____ to ____ hours
   Over: ____ weeks, at ____ hours a week        Exam date: ____________
   Fee paid by:  [ ] me   [ ] employer   [ ] employer, with a condition: ______________________
   Renewal in ____ years, paid by: ______________

5. THE DECISION
   [ ] Book it: the door is named, the kind fits, the hours are planned.
   [ ] Not yet: build the evidence first; the next teaching ticket to take is ____________________
   [ ] No: the door does not need it; the evenings go to ____________________ instead.
   Review this sheet on: ____________

Dana's sheet was filled in at the kitchen table on the Sunday night. It had "junior administrator roles, external or internal, screened by HR first" in the first box, and "networking fundamentals" in the second. It had two gateway write-ups in the third, and ninety hours over four months in the fourth. The fifth box was "book it". She sat it in the spring, after the write-ups, which is the right order, and the exam turned out to be the easiest part.

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