MCSA Certificate Newbie

YAHA

Hello,

I am a web developer who usually has nothing to do with system administrating and server side. I currently have an opportunity to take the classes needed for the MCSA and take the certificate examination itself (our company is willing to pay for it because they want another person to be able to maintain our servers should something happen to our system administrator). My question is whether the time invested in test preparation is worth it. What else do you gain besides the actual certificate, knowledge and expertise? Do you become more marketable on the job market as an IT person? Is MCSA alone is sufficient to get some kind of job?

I am a pretty busy person outside my work thus any kind of extra project or undertaking would require me to put on hold some other endeavors. I would like to hear your opinion on how this certification could benefit a programmer / developer.


Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Daniel333

There is no dollar amount I can place on that knowledge. But I firmly believe the MCSA is worth getting if you will find yourself doing any sort of systems administration in the near future. There are a dozen little trivial features of Windows you might be surprised are in there.

undomiel

Are you looking to make a career change? Or at a hybrid web developer/sys admin role? I've seen a few postings looking for people who can manage the server and can program the back end. If you aren't looking at either of those (or have a related idea that I can't think of currently) then there probably would be very little benefit of an MCSA to you. My experience so far is that the MCSA did not open many doors for me but achieving MCSE certification (which is very recent so I don't know the true pay off yet) has gotten me talking to quite a few companies both in state and out of state. So it pretty much depends upon what you are aiming for. I never applied for any of those hybrid roles as I have no interest in programming the back end, so I couldn't say if an MCSA would be sufficient for that. Probably depends upon the company's/HR's focus.