Training and Certification: Can You Have One Without the Other?

by Dan Blacharski

November 19, 2001 —

For those of us who already know it all, getting certified is just a
way to prove how smart we are to the world. It's like a "Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval." Laying down a C-note and spending a
couple of hours taking an exam is a small price to pay for a few
letters after your name. There's no doubt that those letters increase
your worth in the marketplace.

But what comes before the test? A little last-minute cram session, or a
full-scale training course? It depends on your level of existing
knowledge, but a survey released by CompTIA and Prometric implies that
training and certification go together like kielbasa and beer. The
results showed that certification candidates who finished classroom
training were more likely to pass certification tests, and 40 percent
of managers said that the most important part of certification is the
preceding training. Sixty-four percent of certified individuals believe
that both training and certification are beneficial to professional
development, and more than 70 percent of certified professionals
indicated that they would pursue training even if it did not lead to
certification.

Training and certification do seem to go hand-in-hand, and the majority
of professionals in the study took some sort of formal training to
prepare for certification testing. The survey showed that most IT
professionals use a blended approach in preparing for IT certification,
or a combination of formal training and self-study. IT professionals
cited instructor-led classroom training as the most useful method to
prepare for certification (24%), followed closely by printed materials
for self-study (23%). A higher proportion of IT professionals that used
both self-study and self-assessment tests in preparation for
certification exams passed their courses (51%) compared to candidates
who used all other methodologies.

Here's another little stat that the survey showed, and depending on
your point of view, it's either alarming or gratifying: the percentage
of people that pass their certification tests has been declining, going
from 74% in 1999 to 58% in 2001. Obviously, more people going into the
testing center are poorly prepared for the exams they are about to
take. Again, this points to the need for some formal training before
the exam. But from a job-seeker's perspective, the decline in passing
candidates makes the cert a little more prestigious for those who do
make the grade. Obviously, passing an exam that not everybody can get
through gives you more status than passing one that almost everybody
else passes as well. Being able to say to an employer, "I passed this
exam," is valuable, but being able to say, "I passed this exam and a
whole bunch of other people didn't," is even more valuable.

What does all this mean? For one thing, TANSTAAFL (There ain't no such
thing as a free lunch). For most of us, we're better off putting in the
time to take a course before the test, even if we're already fairly
well-versed in the subject matter. Of course, the more letters you have
after your name the better, and if you can get some of those without
studying, more power to you. But chances are, the folks that have just
about every letter of the alphabet appended to their name had to take
some courses somewhere. We may also be able to deduce from the results
that employers will be more favorably impressed by a candidate who has
taken training and earned a certificate, than by a candidate that
simply earned the certificate.

ITworld