Here are some short posts (long in aggregate) that I wrote on a throwaway blog on Posterous around 2009. Posterous got acquired by Twitter, and I didn't like it all that much anyway, so I exported and sorted by interestingness. Fair warning: they are a bit rough, but might be useful.
I was talking to a woman in the information security field last night. She talked about getting more certifications a few times. I say to her, "In software, a lot of times certifications are kind of a joke." Meaning, a lot of certifications are merely memorizing the documentation or don't really show that the person knows what they are talking about. She said that many of the certifications were useful–but not without the proper experience to back them up. When she was hiring people, she would first sort through the resumes to find people with the certifications that made sense, and then approach those people first. The fallback was the people with fewer certifications. However, she wanted to see if other people thought the same way.
Next, she said something that I found very interesting. She said that she created two resumes for herself and sent them both to a few companies in her field. In both, she used different names. In the first, she listed her current skills, experiences, and certifications. In the second, she did the same but also listed the certifications she was considering going for. If the second resume got many more responses, it was clear that the certification had market value.
I thought this was an effective approach because she got information before needing to actually take the time to pursue the certification. At first, I thought it was similar to split testing, but what made it interesting was that she was not trying to optimize some asset she currently had. Rather, she was optimizing for future actions. It reminded me a bit of lean startup techniques, in that she was testing a value proposition rather than building the product first and seeing who would buy it later. For something that might take a couple of months of nightly study, it seemed like something worth testing first. I've long thought a useful technique has been asking the question, "What are we trying to learn, and how might we learn it faster?" This is undoubtedly orders of magnitude more effective in terms of ascertaining the value of a certification.
One of the signals a certification gives is that the person is willing to stick with something long enough to get it, and also has an interest in doing something in that area in the future. So it can be useful, but not universally. There were some people with a lot of certifications but only a year of experience. These people would likely need to work for a bit to get more broad experience before they would be able to effectively use their certification knowledge.
Clearly the market value of some educational experience is not the only thing you should consider. Is it going to make your career more interesting or add meaning to your life? But these are questions for another time. I hope you enjoyed this technique.
For more on split-testing in the physical world…
Split-testing Online Profiles
Occasionally while going through personal writing, I come upon an idea I wrote down in the heat of the moment and that seems good later. I have a Vim function that prints out the date, so that's how I start personal writing entries.
