Applied knowledge

modular

Hello,

This is a sincere question. After completing a certification how many of you could apply that knowledge in a lab situation?

As I study for new certs I am trying to setup a close-to-real-life scenario in a lab. This sometimes means piecing together a couple cisco routers, a couple machines running vmware, and try and duplicate networks.

It is nice to pass a cert test, but what about when you're sitting there in an interview and they say, "I have this test machine here, show me how to ..." It happens all too often these days.

I think it is important to try an emulate situations at home to give yourself experience...

Any comments on this?

cheeblie

I agree that by passing the test, you are merely saying that you understand how things should be not necessarily how to make it that way. While I can't speak for everyone here, I feel that most people setup small network environments at their homes or have access to a decent sized lab. I would welcome any employer asking me to perform certain tasks as part of an interview. Since I have no work experience, it seems that this is the only way that I could prove that I'm competent. Whenever I come across an example in a book, I always try to setup the same situation on my network. I'm fairly certain that not all people do this for studying, in fact some probably don't study at all ::cough:: brain **** ::cough::. So I think you're right that people should have hands on experience. Most people don't have a clue what they're doing if they haven't had that experience.

Cheeblie

Webmaster

It is nice to pass a cert test, but what about when you're sitting there in an interview and they say, "I have this test machine here, show me how to ..." It happens all too often these days.

True. At a certain point it became so bad, they made up a term for this: "paper MCSE" (or paper CCNA, etc )

But it is improving, for example, with the sims in Cisco and MS exams, it is getting darn hard to pass an exam 'just' by reading a book. Hands-on is already becoming essential.

After completing a certification how many of you could apply that knowledge in a lab situation?

I think that depends a lot on what 'that knowledge' is. Research showed that most people only remember 50% of what they must learn for an exam. 25% extra can be 'recalled' thru reviewing a topic (in case of exams, a cram is a good example). The other 25% is lost... (perhaps that is why the CCNA exam (passing score) is so hard to pass for many people nowadays...). I figure the other 25% can be 'learned' by actually performing the related tasks... so logically, one could say that 25% is practical knowledge that, for most people, must be learned by experience. Although then I would assume you want to know it all

Additionally, since a lot of theory is required to perform the practical tasks (well), playing with routers/computers/networks/OSs/etc makes the 75% stick even longer.

I think it is important to try an emulate situations at home to give yourself experience...

I think it is essential. Especially for MS and Cisco certs, but also for CompTIA's A+ and Linux+ exam.

Having said all that, I don't think it is required for everyone. What's more important, especially for those with a couple of years or more of experience, is that you can cope with things you don't know/ haven't learned. Things are changing all the time, faster than you can pass an exam. Take MCSE for example, it's a lot to cover, but there's even more in the resource kit and knowledge base articles, and the latter is in many cases the thing you need the most, that's where the common problems and their solutions are described. I've studied months and months to learn all the details about Exchange 5.5, about 18 months later I was in charge of creating one of my country's largest Exchange server environments with thousands of clients, dozens of servers and with about 10 extra connections to countries all over the world. I learned much more from 'doing' that than studying and studying. I didn't need to pick up my training material, because it wouldn't be in there anyway. White papers, case studies, technet articles, more than I ever wanted to read. And that was just an MS product... when it comes to networking in general there is no end to want to can (or need) to learn.

It is great to 'play around' with equipment and software at home in a small lab, and like I said I think it is essential, but for many employers it really doesn't count as experience, or hands-on... for them it's just 'playing around'.

Don't worry, I do have a point here...

If you want to make a career in IT, primarily by doing self-study, take any job you can get, and go from there. When IT was booming we used to call it "pulling tasks" (uhm.. that's very rughly translated). Companies needed people for every little thing. A company I worked at as a NT 4 sys admin needed to separate a LAN in two LANs both with it's own WAN connection. I'd been looking at the CCNA cert, so instead of hiring an expensive netowrk engineer, I convinced my employer to let me do it. I would 'simply' work it out in my own time, create it on paper... at that time I was applying that knowledge not in a lab, but in a real scenario. After I passed the exam I had the certs and the experience to put on my resume.

Just my 8 cents

modular

Thanks for the great feedback