So I looked it up and Google is offering certifications in various fields through Coursera, and they claim it’ll help one get a good paying IT job.
People have made videos on Youtube talking about them with varying answers and in the comments, people often discuss using them as a springboard to get CompTIA certs.
But are these certifications actually worth the money financially? Do people actually get hired if that’s all an employee has? Don’t employers want people with degrees too?
My Career:
- Crappy retail management job for a long defunct retail electronics store.
- Crappy retail management job for a long defunct toy store.
- Crappy desk job as an inside sales agent for a computer supplier.
- Hired onto the service/support side of computer supplier above and worked crappy Service Desk job for a few years. a. Used my down time at the SD to attain my MCSE, CCNA, Red Hat and CLP (Certified Lotus Professional for Lotus Notes 5 and above and no I don’t expect you to have heard of it) certifications. The company paid for me to take the tests, which was great.
- Hired on the systems engineers department of said computer supplier, which had subsequently stopped being a supplier and strictly a Managed Services Vendor. It was also bought out by an extremely large German company that you’ve probably heard of.
- Got my ITIL 1.0 certifications (Problem, Incident, Change, Service Delivery) and started working in processes rather than systems. I’m currently ITIL 4.0 certified.
- Laid off from above company and worked a variety of contract jobs, mainly Major Incident response and the like, as I have a pretty wide skill set.
The above covers about the last 33 years of my career with 28 of it in IT.
I’d probably make more money if I refreshed some of my certifications, but working on the process side in really large environments means I’m not on call and I don’t deal with emergencies at 3am. I currently work for a very very large defense contractor that you definitely have heard of. My wife is a physician and works an on call schedule that can be brutal at times, so I’m happy to not be on call. I handle the kids, while she’s running off to the hospital saving some poor child.
