Earning IT certification: The best way to prove your own value

Earning certification is equivalent to a long term self-learning and self-investment for IT employees. Because IT professionals always not only encounter the rapid change of manufacture technique but deal with complicated information construction of enterprise, they must constantly update their essential IT knowledge in reaching management occupation.

Earning certification is only a beginning but not the last achievement. Nowadays the updating period of IT technique is getting shorter and shorter whereas the numbers of IT specialist are increasing much more than before. Additionally, the extensive establishment of university in Taiwan also results in IT talents overflowing. Accordingly, some urgent problems have been raised. How do we become superior to other candidates regarding every IT specialist? Also when we are learning similar technique and device manipulation via similar training, how can we make a breakthrough differentiating from others?

Besides, certification is originally used to prove IT specialist qualification but it turns to become a common market strategy of which manufacturers rapidly modify their certificate system. Thus, many people gradually earn these certifications by memorizing the answers of previous tested questions. In this situation, how can we choose another road to prove our value?

In fact, a truly outstanding IT professional does not focus on one specialty forever but cultivate his independent troubleshooting ability across different fields and arrange a regular long term self-learning plan in accumulating essential knowledge of multiple fields and finally applying his technique to management.

Certificate and school education would never replace to each other but are two necessary conditions for job application. College education provides fundamental theory while graduate education further focuses on some specific topics but merely stays in academic research so that school knowledge is quite far away from the actual application in industry. Nevertheless, it is not necessary that college professor has to teach the latest manufacture manipulation while computer skill training institute has to start from fundamental theory. On the contrary, a long term teaching of fundamental theory is required for constructing our knowledgebase while a short term training of technique application is only necessary for quickly adapting your current job environment. As a result, receiving school education and earning certification are both important in career plan.

Earning IT certification should be a part of your career plan. You may obtain many experiences of solving practical problems in your work but we believe you just merely know how but not know why. On the other hand, you may know how to resolve various problems during the process of preparing certification test but these problems are not necessarily occurring in real environment of enterprise. Meanwhile, you may also often encounter many problems that are not mentioned in textbook. Accordingly, you have to earn certification for proving your job ability even you have many work experience for many years while you still have to be back to practical training even you have earned many certifications. Thus, accumulating work experience and earning certification are both necessary in your career. In addition to proving your job achievement, certification also refers to the indication of latest techniques. Although it is easy to become one specific specialist via constant work discipline when staying in the same field for a long time, one day your original work experience may not be workable in troubleshooting across fields if techniques are constantly updating. For instance, the essential networking knowledge of system engineer, compared to the one of network engineer, is usually very weak so these system engineers usually do not have independent troubleshooting ability toward networking problems. Therefore, you have to prove your multiple specialties, e.g. network and system, by earning certification of various fields.

The destination of certification system is promoting the techniques that are not mentioned in school education. Though information staffs have many ways of further studying, e.g. college of continuing education, textbook, technique exchange community and etc., original manufacturer authorized training center is still a learning shortcut that cannot be replaced.

Regarding college of continuing education, because they are widely distributed in many local areas, this way has many advantages for students such as low expense and short distance from your living place. However, such common education usually focuses on basic computer manipulation because of cost consideration so we cannot acquire superior techniques in this way. On the other hand, textbooks cost relatively lower and easily obtained but the book contents are usually so complicated that you have to spend much time digesting the essential knowledge. In fact, textbooks are only appropriate for your reference. Even though you practice on physical device by following book procedure, you may be still wasting your time to fumble for vague concepts but not be familiar with technique details. Eventually you will be probably always chasing the updating techniques without proficiency.

Besides, in the case of technique exchange community, its object is only suitable for some specific advanced technicians, especially original manufacturer supported community. Therefore, the content of these technique documents that are only appropriate for technician reference is too complicated to learn. On the contrary, they are only suitable for guiding system maintenance and troubleshooting.

As a result, regarding certification system, computer skill training institute provides original manufacturer authorized teaching materials, devices, instructors and course arrangement so that the initiates can quickly reach high efficiency of learning. However, we never say you can give up the other ways of further studying. It always says, “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink.’’ It means you will never make any progress only via your instructor’s guidance. On the contrary, you should also make your own self-study program after class. For example, you can reinforce essential knowledge via reference books or find resolution in technique exchange community. In addition, because your classmates in training institute are from all kinds of field so you can invite your partners to organize a study group in increasing learning efficiency by sharing work experience. Therefore, it can yield twice the result and half the effort through this way.

In addition to a few severe examinations via lab implementation, nowadays the validity of most certifications has been suspected by many enterprise managers. Nevertheless, the only thing you can do is maintain your positive learning attitude and constantly discover new information. Once you have accumulated much essential knowledge and sufficient required techniques, the industries are still desirous of such IT talent like you.