tanker27 wrote:I have my MCSE.
Advice:
1. Pay for a cram course that practically feed you the exact answers.
2. Find the answers for all the tests online, memorize them.
3. Regurgitate.
As you stated yourself most IT people don't hold much weight to it. However for those NON-IT recruiters they use it to weed out resumes.
The only reason I have mine................My company gave me a bonus for completing it.
Experience trumps all except in the case of any Cisco cert........Damn those are hard!
QFT. If you already work in the industry and have a few years experience having your employer pay for you to attend courses is the ideal scenario. Just buying the brain dumps is the way to go otherwise.
You already have demonstrated experience with the platform from your employment history, braindumping the exams to get the bit of paper so you pass the keyword matching tests when someone looks at your resume is fine in my book.
Where classroom training excels is when you get a good mix of people all familiar with the product in a room together, and get to discuss problems you're facing with people with similar experience and different points of view. Its the discussion which takes place that isnt related to the courseware that is by far the most interesting and valuable component of classroom training in my opinion.
The actual coarse material, which you have to learn in meticulous detail for the exams but in reality would always have instant online access to, is usually pretty worthless for someone who's already worked with the products. It provides good fuel for discussion of topics which won't be examined when you're in a classroom setting. If you self-study it then it becomes of very limited value.
Memorising, for example, the command line switches for a dozen different LDAP tools so you can succesfully answer perhaps one or two questions about them on the actual exam strikes me as a colossall waste of time when you'll most likely not retain this information once you've taken the test as the entire thing is documented for you on demand in the real world by applying the all powerful -? command switch.
Another issue which has been mentioned above is the occasional need to abandon all common sense and answer as the vendor has prescribed regardless of how you would handle a situation in real life (though these scenarios are relatively rare as most questions have pretty limited scope such as the options of an individual dialogue box).
Another recurring problem is factually inaccurate questions within the exams. I've passed multiple exams with scores of 100% or so where I've braindumped the exam. In a few different exams (I can remember one Microsoft and 2 Citrix exams) I've scored 100% by deliberately answering with the answer from the brain dump even though that answer is completely incorrect and either another answer is correct or no correct statement appears.
Identical questions get repeated two or even three times throughout the exams.
Yet another problem I've seen repeatedly is flawed questions such as "Pick two correct statements from the following five" where 2 of the 5 statements would be identical, or 3 of 5 or only 1 of 5 would be factually correct.
Identical questions get repeated two or even three times throughout the exams.
Again these problems dont account for more than perhaps 2 or 3 questions out of say 50 in a given test, but they sour the credibility of the entire testing process.
Some certifications do have more inherrent value - the Citrix, Cisco and VMWare exams all come to mind as the higher level certifications all take place in a lab environment where an ability to problem solve and actually work with the products is tested rather than a simplistic multiple choice exam.
For everything else I'd highly advise you to just cheat! I'm certified up the ass (from years of working for resellers) and I seriously recommend that you spend your time doing your job and not learning the course material to satisfy the vendors. Just get the certification and a pay rise =D
