Do you believe in certification?

There are many certification program now. Do you beleive in all the courses. I don't really beelive all the things. I like only hands on experience which is very useful compare to those courses. How many of you study by your self without going to any classes.

It all depends, some of them you need to go for lesson to learn basic info. Some of them are really waste of money. It is basically depends on the course.

If you don't know the fundermental knowledge, then you might need to go for the lessons.

Just my 2 cents.

I believe in hands on experience and a plus if people can show it off with a certification. I have worked with people who have a certification and inefficient when it comes to real work.

Well, what I can say is that my CCNA brought me a job.
I took the CCNA exam (with 87% for 26 minutes from 90 given) at the beginning of March, 2003. 3 months later I was invited for a job in Cyprus and the managers there paid a lot of attention that I have Cisco certificate (which in my point of view is stupid).

However a certificate + knowledge will give you a lot.
The certificate is the thing that will allow you to open the door and enter the room. The knowledge behind that certificate will allow you then to stay into the room. That is my theory.

IMHO, a CCNA + RHCE (RedHat Certified Engineer) is a very good start and can open a lot of doors.

I agree. It's the combination that counts. And RHCE + CCNA is certainly a good combination.

[kooshin.com]

Well to me certificaiton is very important and it build a good company

If you have some cash laying around pick it up and get 2 or 3 of the top ones. It pays when you are looking for a job

We believe that hands on is the very best way, but it all depends on who you are going to work for. There is no exact science that will let you know which companies look for hands on and which look for cert's, but I can tell you this, smaller companies that are looking to achieve fast results deffinatly want to know if you have done certain things in a production environment. Doing things in the lab is one thing, but when down time and $ are at risk it is a a totally different ball game.

Having a cert is a great for some people, and its great if you can read something in a book and then take a test to prove you know it, or if you run into a problem that you can go lookup how to fix it, but when it comes to the real world, there is not time to go look in the book, companies want you to have seem the problem before or atleast have a good idea how to fix it quickly to avoide loss of reveune.

They will make great paper weights if no one cares that you have them