Experience Necessary

Still, no amount of certifications can replace hands-on experience, which could be the decisive factor in securing employment during such a tight job market.

"Some people are very good test-takers, but it doesn't mean they can do the work," says Kerry Gerontianos, president of Incremax Technology, a Web-application consultancy in New York, and acting president of the International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners. "If you have 10 years' experience, you probably can cram for a test and still pass it. But if you're more junior, you may have to study for weeks or even months. It's no walk in the park."

In general, VARs, vendors and testing centers say they're satisfied with how certification testing is administered and valued. In the wake of the tech industry's boom and bust, the 76L process has returned to its normal, productive state. A few years ago, when jobs requiring certification were overabundant, the volume of people taking them diluted the legitimacy of the credentials.

"Back then, guys flipping burgers a couple of weeks earlier were getting certified and landing jobs alongside people with years of experience," says Michael Cocanower, president of ITSynergy, a Phoenix-based systems integrator.

Things have settled down. And while certifications don't replace on-the-job experience, they do show how serious someone is about staying up-to-date in the profession. Vendors like Microsoft require its partners to have anywhere from two to 14 certified technicians on staff, and partners often compensate their employees for obtaining additional certifications,ones that at hiring time can tell an employer how serious a candidate is about staying sharp. "Even though I don't rely on the tests, all things being equal, when I'm hiring someone, I'll go with the experienced one who was motivated to take and pass the latest tests," Gerontianos says.

The Hands-On Advantage

On the administrative side, there are literally dozens of companies that act as the middlemen between vendors and VARs, offering instruction and tests in a wide variety of areas. One of the more prominent ones is Total Seminars, an educational and testing center based in Houston that focuses on computer repair and networking training. The company has published nine books on A++certification, and a variety of lab manuals, exam software and instruction guides on other topics.

CEO Dudley Lehmer says Total Seminars' biggest hurdle is competing with lower-cost testing centers that can't match his company's breadth but appeal to people who want to save money. "It's frustrating for us as a hands-on outfit to compete with people who offer lesser training at a lower cost," he says. "We turn out a better student, but our cost difference is pretty dramatic, and a lot of people prefer to take the low road."

That creates fairly large disparities between people who have passed the same tests,ones presumably resolved by the experience criteria mentioned by Gerontianos and others. "The big question about certification is, Does it really mean the test-takers know their stuff?" Total Seminars' Lehmer asks. "Too many places allow you to go and memorize everything, when hands-on training is always better."

To that end, vendors have been working closely with testing centers to keep them informed of new developments, and keeping partners up-to-date on certification changes. Vendors are also taking the lead in offering simulation- and scenario-testing with their own hands-on training that mirrors the types of situations technicians are likely to encounter on the job. Chuck Hernandez, director of education at Clearwater, Fla.-based Tech Data, which has a subsidiary devoted to training its employees in-house, says vendors including Cisco, Citrix, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft differentiate themselves from the others by understanding the value of good training.

"These vendors give us the best resources they have, so you know their certifications mean something," Hernandez says. "The vendors who don't understand the relationship between product training and the sales of those products are learning the hard way, because they have classes that no one signs up for."

The recent emergence of e-learning and remote labs,innovations that have made hands-on testing cheaper for vendors to administer,have also been a boon to the testing process, Hernandez says. "They help out by developing curriculums and setting up labs that give us access to equipment," he adds. "It's driven a lot of the cost out of testing."

One criticism of vendors is that they focus on certifying enterprise technicians, which doesn't always translate well to partners whose clients are in the SMB market. "The biggest problem vendors have had with a company like ours is that they're very focused on the enterprise environment," ITSynergy's Cocanower says. "Everything on the exams is for environments with thousands of PCs, but a lot of companies only have one server."

In addition, there's always room for improvement when it comes to communication among vendors, partners and testing centers. Keeping them informed of changes in an industry where almost every technology is updated every 18 to 36 months is no small task.

"We've always had a problem getting solid information about new tests and revisions," Lehmer says. "There's usually a small window in which to update, but vendors never meet their own schedules, so they don't want to commit anything."

Lehmer is hopeful, however. The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) was slated to release the newest A++certification at press time,the fourth revision in seven years,and Lehmer says his company was well-prepared for the change. "They started warning us last fall," he says.

Vendors, solution providers and top-notch testing centers all agree that no training is truly complete without hands-on experience. It's often the criterion that separates the savvy test-takers from those who learn by doing.