Vendor Neutral vs Specific Certifications

I'll be completely blunt, I think vendor neutral certifications in regards of take away aren't very helpful from my experiences.

I've sat the RMP, PMP, CAPM, ITIL X 3, Project +, A+ etc..... And never felt I really gained a whole lot from them. Not once to be honest..... Except for some dialog/terms.

Now from a technical perspective, working through some MS certifications, mostly database, some passed and some failed I always felt I've gotten a lot of those certifications. In fact my latest database certification while working on the MS stack was EXTREMELY helpful, some of the coding and strategies I learned from my studies helped me stand out above the rest. In fact to quantify that, think 30% pay bump..... Not even related to the paper, just the knowledge gain from it.

Never once have I felt that a vendor neutral certification has done that for me.

This isn't about value and resumes, just overall knowledge and take away. I'm sure some will differ, but I can't believe a process / vendor neutral certification would supercede a strong technical one......

Just saying.

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EANx

I'm a little surprised to find you placed the PMP on that list. Having been a long-time engineer before moving into management, I largely agree about the value of a good vendor cert over a vendor-neutral one. But from the business side, you don't have processes owned by a particular company and you have to learn best-practice somewhere. Before my current job, I had managed projects but looking back it was in a very haphazard fashion. The PMP gave me the tools (and my senior exec the confidence) to carry multi-million dollar projects from inception to completion. Before taking the bootcamp, I wouldn't have known diddly about the difference between a project charter vs scope vs requirements but now, I had a 750k project that I know would have gone sideways if I hadn't known how to press for a good person to monitor the project. When not just the first draft but 2nd and third drafts at a charter and scope were sloppy, I knew the "PM" had to go. Had I not had that training, I would have accepted sloppy docs and not realized it was troubled until well into the project.

Danielm7

I think vendor specific can go into more detail on specific tools like you mentioned. If I just said you can take a generic firewall certification, I doubt you'd have to know every command of every firewall manufacturer. But you can bet if it's Cisco specific that they can get pretty detailed.

In the security space there are some that go against that theory though. The Offensive Security certs are all practical and all hands on using a bunch of different open source tools and techniques, SANS does the same as well.

DatabaseHead

@EANx, the PMP is a summarized version of management classes in a management MA or MBA program. Risk, Operations, Supply Chain, Quality, Project etc..... If you have an MBA the PMP is extremely redundant......

All the fancy terms you learn, gold plating, scope creep, weak matrix organization is learned in MBA studies. And besides the lessons learned from the PMP was either intuitive or completely ridiculous. Document bloat......

I found reading a book on agile was more than enough for me to survive project management in today's world of PM, this includes multiple million dollar data integration efforts....

While I am not the champion I am held responsible for large sections of the project, like most.....

You mention sloppy project charter, I have PM'd in the past and can easily ID a poorly written, RFP, RFI, SOW and finally a charter AKA scope document.... This isn't attributed to the RMP or PMP, but experience and my MBA.

Again not trying to discredit your findings, but from my vantage point it wasn't really that helpful....

SteveLavoie

CISSP is vendor neutral and it is of a great value

Iristheangel

SANS, Offensive Security, CWNA, etc certfications are all vendor neutral and extremely valuable.

DatabaseHead

Iristheangel wrote: »

SANS, Offensive Security, CWNA, etc certfications are all vendor neutral and extremely valuable.

Did you actually read the post before replying?

This isn't about value and resumes, just overall knowledge and take away. I'm sure some will differ, but I can't believe a process / vendor neutral certification would supercede a strong technical one......

The point of the thread, from a learning perspective technical > process. If you disagree with that, EG CISSP > CCIE I am okay with that, but I never once said they weren't valuable.

cyberguypr

Vendor neutral usually focus on foundations and best practices for any given area. Vendor specific certs go into the weeds. Can't compare that. You gain wider knowledge with vendor neutral, more focused with vendor specific. Which one is "better" is up for interpretation.

SteveLavoie

Ok, from a learning point of view. I would say that vendor specific are more detailed and specific than vendor neutral. In some way it can be good and bad, it all depend on you and your career.

By example, I don't do Cisco, but I do a lot of networking. I am surely near CCNP-level of knowledge but with other vendor (HP, Sonicwall..), it would serve no purpose to get a CCNA / CCNP. Network+ is more "useful" even if value is less.

DatabaseHead

@Cyber I get that.

My observation, which I clearly called out in my original post was that I learned the most going for technical certification and profited the most down the road whereas the process certifications never really helped push my overall knowledge.

I realize the CISSP can be lucrative, we've seen that time and time again on this forum, in fact I did analysis about 2 years ago and showed that ~50% of security positions I queried/studied either preferred or required that certification. That's not the point though..... No disputing that

The point was from my angle that I learn more applicable skills when I deep dive into the technical certifications.....

Again if you don't agree with that, that's fine, but I want to make sure my original message and the intent of the message was being answer correctly.

I don't think which one is better is the right approach. Rather than...... Which ones have you gotten more out of and you can't say both, it's impossible for them both to have equally impacted your knowledge and or you ascension through the ranks.....

NetworkNewb

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Did you actually read the post before replying?

Seems somewhere along the way you changed your idea from "vendor neutral" to "non-technical" certs.... Or you are trying to put them in the same boat. Which isn't true, especially with a bunch security certifications like Iris mentioned.

PC509

I think you've talked your way through the meaning of some of those already, and you're not wrong.

Vendor neutral - foundations (some foundations are much more in depth or difficult) and theory.

Vendor specific - more applied and technical.

This is to be expected. One, you're learning the technologies. The other, you're learning a very specific vendor's technologies and how to use it.

DatabaseHead

Seems somewhere along the way you changed your idea from "vendor neutral" to "non-technical" certs.... Or you are trying to put them in the same boat. Which isn't true, especially with security certifications

No I didn't.......

I originally stated these certifications.....
RMP, PMP, CAPM, ITIL X 3, Project +, A+ (A+ is a vendor neutral "technical certification" and I could of thrown in network +, Server +) These are from my experiences..... Maybe that would of been more helpful.

All of these are vendor neutral certifications. Some technical in nature and others not.....

I merely broke off to discuss the PMP because I was engaging with EANx......

DatabaseHead

I'm going to summarize this into two questions to make it easy on everyone.....

In your opinion do you learn more from vendor specific certifications or neutral?

Which one has helped ascend you through your career?

NetworkNewb

OK...

DatabaseHead wrote: »

The point of the thread, from a learning perspective technical > process.

Iristheangel

DatabaseHead wrote: »

Did you actually read the post before replying?

The point of the thread, from a learning perspective technical > process. If you disagree with that, EG CISSP > CCIE I am okay with that, but I never once said they weren't valuable.

Sigh. Calm down, DB. I read it. You started the thread with "in regards of take away aren't very helpful from my experiences. " and then moved on to "Now from a technical perspective." Even then, there are some extremely technical vendor neutral certifications.

Also, if you're making the claim that Offensive Security or SANS certifications aren't technical enough, I'm all ears on how you came to that conclusion.

cyberguypr

Having just finished an exam evelopment workshop I say let's mark these questions as "intent unclear - consider for rewriting or retirement". LOL!

Iristheangel

cyberguypr wrote: »

Haivng just finished an exam evelopment workshop I say let's mark these questions as "intent unclear - consider for rewriting or retirement". LOL!

LoLoLoL.

DatabaseHead

Iristheangel wrote: »

Sigh. Calm down, DB. I read it. You started the thread with "in regards of take away aren't very helpful from my experiences. " and then moved on to "Now from a technical perspective." Even then, there are some extremely technical vendor neutral certifications.

Also, if you're making the claim that Offensive Security or SANS certifications aren't technical enough, I'm all ears on how you came to that conclusion.

No you didn't......

Your reply after my initial post was this.

SANS, Offensive Security, CWNA, etc certfications are all vendor neutral and extremely valuable.

Completely irrelevant to the original post.....

My follow up to your original post was poorly worded, I was in the process train of mind after replying to xEAN.

I should of said vendor specific AKA CCIE and vendor neutral..... And as usually you didn't answer the question, you just want to argue.

Glad to know I have such a big fan

Iris I see you have your minions trained well..... Nicely done!

SteveLavoie

cyberguypr wrote: »

Having just finished an exam evelopment workshop I say let's mark these questions as "intent unclear - consider for rewriting or retirement". LOL!

Is it an ISC2 exam workshop? I was selected for a SSCP workshop, but I wasnt fast enough to confirm it so I lost my place. How was your experience?

cyberguypr

@Steve I'll reply separately. Don't want to thread-jack because this is about to get interesting. LOL

PC509

Technical - you know how to do the thing. Process - you know why to do the thing.

Both are very valuable. Do you learn more with one vs. the other? Not really. You're just learning how to do vs. why you're doing it. If you're a technical, hands on guy, you'll get more value from the how. If you're someone that's building, designing, managing something, maybe the vendor neutral will be more beneficial. You may not need to know how to configure something from a CLI, but you'll know what needs to be done.

DatabaseHead

PC509 wrote: »

Technical - you know how to do the thing. Process - you know why to do the thing.

Both are very valuable. Do you learn more with one vs. the other? Not really. You're just learning how to do vs. why you're doing it. If you're a technical, hands on guy, you'll get more value from the how. If you're someone that's building, designing, managing something, maybe the vendor neutral will be more beneficial. You may not need to know how to configure something from a CLI, but you'll know what needs to be done.

PC509 - Thanks for the reply.

So which are you technical or managerial? I am assuming if you answer this question i'll get the answer I am looking for.

cyberguypr wrote: »

@Steve I'll reply separately. Don't want to thread-jack because this is about to get interesting. LOL

You already did......

cyberguypr

So what do you want me to do? Reply here or ignore the guy?

DatabaseHead

cyberguypr wrote: »

So what do you want me to do? Reply here or ignore the guy?

Having just finished an exam evelopment workshop I say let's mark these questions as "intent unclear - consider for rewriting or retirement". LOL!

See above.

cyberguypr

We're going in circles here. I'll just wait for the trained minions to chime in.

shochan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WpMlwVwydo

EagerDinosaur

The only truly vendor-neutral certifications I have are the Mickey Mouse 15 minute "certifications" in things like data security that my employer insists I pass. On the other hand, I think the best vendor-specific exams are those which try to be somewhat vendor neutral. Microsoft's exam 70-480 "Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3" is about 90% vendor-neutral, and a really good web development primer, although it's looking a bit outdated. Exam 70-461 "Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012" uses ANSI SQL rather than T-SQL wherever possible, and is the better for it.

Iristheangel

Are you sure you're looking for replies and not an echo chamber? Cause you seem to get really upset when any discussion happens that doesn't fall into your original viewpoint and instead of having a logical conversation or debate about it, everyone else's view is wrong and they all read your question incorrectly.

SteveLavoie

my only answer.. PITA

cyberguypr

Iris, on behalf of DBHead and in the spirit of saving time, I want to tell you that you are wrong