Does Certs matter in higher education IT jobs?

tjb122982

I really want to end up working in a college or a university one day and I was wondering if anyone here works in a academic setting or has knowledge to whether certs as the A+ or Network+ matter in higher education or government or non-profits for that matter.

lsud00d

It depends on the position really, but for the most part I'd say no..

I spent 4 years in Higher Ed. at a major university (look at my name ), and the tier I analysts range from bachelor's degrees in many things unrelated to IT, to guys with a few certs...A+ will be good if you want to be a Help Desk/Field Tech Analyst, but Network+ isn't really important...vendor specific certs are. College's have $$$ and have uber huge infrastructure contracts (like Cisco for networking), so Cisco certs would be more important in this case.

Et cetera.

nethacker

lsud00d wrote: »

It depends on the position really, but for the most part I'd say no..

I spent 4 years in Higher Ed. at a major university (look at my name ), and the tier I analysts range from bachelor's degrees in many things unrelated to IT, to guys with a few certs...A+ will be good if you want to be a Help Desk/Field Tech Analyst, but Network+ isn't really important...vendor specific certs are. College's have $$$ and have uber huge infrastructure contracts (like Cisco for networking), so Cisco certs would be more important in this case.

Et cetera.

seconded

Akaricloud

The university that I worked for let certs count as work experience. In hiring, someone with 2 years of experience and a couple certs would get hired over someone with 4 years experience. That also played a huge role in salary negotiations for new hires.

chrisone

"Does Certs matter in higher education IT jobs?"

Yes

anothergeek

Ive worked in Higher Education for the last 4 years and they hire people with degrees for the most part and certs will only help with salary negotiations.

MentholMoose

I don't know if IT in higher ed differs from other industries when it comes to certs. Some hiring managers care about certs, some don't. My last job was in the IT department for a college and almost nobody cared or even knew about certs. AFAIK the only person besides myself in the IT department with any certs was a DBA with an Oracle cert. However, I've interviewed at other colleges/universities where certs were valued or even required in a few cases.

I would say that entry level certs like A+ are less likely to be useful since most entry level positions (i.e. helpdesk and desktop support) are filled by students. That is great if you are student since you can get good experience with a flexible schedule. Many people who work or have worked in higher ed IT are former student employees (myself included). If you want a good chance at getting a job in higher ed IT I would recommend getting a BA or BS degree since that seems to be a more common requirement.

tjb122982

Generally, would an A+ and Network+ generally reduce (I assume not eliminate) my weakness in "hands on experience"?

MrSheen

The I.T. industry is so broad and because of that different roles require different levels of qualifications or experience. If you want to work with setting up networks, I.T. solutions, server administration or be a support person then an I.T. certification will be of benefit.

If you want to work as an I.T. support person or administrator in a university then you should still do some certifications. But if it's a I.T. academic/professor type of role, then no you don't, as you'll need a fancy degree and relevant experience for that type of role.

MentholMoose

tjb122982 wrote: »

Generally, would an A+ and Network+ generally reduce (I assume not eliminate) my weakness in "hands on experience"?

Certs won't hurt, and by all means get some certs and start applying to jobs, but if you are gunning for an entry-level IT position I think most universities will be very difficult to get into if you're not a student there. You will need to find a school that doesn't staff their helpdesk and desktop support with students. Otherwise, you are competing with people who are happy to have a part-time job paying near minimum wage with no benefits. This is assuming they would even take an application from a non-student, and most probably won't since they treat such jobs like internships. Even if they would take apps from non-students, they wouldn't advertise the job widely (pretty much only student job boards, if the position is even advertised at all). Such universities often do have full-time staff doing helpdesk and desktop support, but they occupy senior-level roles in those departments and probably are former student employees and/or have 10 years experience.

Furthermore, student IT positions will not necessarily be limited to the entry-level. At my previous job (at a college), yes, the only student IT positions I knew of were helpdesk and desktop support. But it was a private liberal arts school with no CS/CIS/MIS departments to draw tons of students looking for IT careers. At the large, public university I attended and worked at as a student employee, students got surprisingly far up the food chain. Students in IT roles typically got generic titles such as "technology assistant" but the actual jobs included helpdesk, desktop support, desktop administration (image creation/deployment), junior-level network administration, and even junior-level security roles (doing security scans, deploying/managing anti-virus, etc.).