The Mind of Mierow

I have been officially working with technology for the past 10 years, unofficially I’ve been playing with it since I saw my first Apple II in 5th grade over 20 years ago. Starting at a small gaming store, then purchasing manager for a I.T. consulting company, to being a Help Desk worker at a university and now a Network Admin, my jobs have covered a broad range of how technology is used.

Over the years I’ve seen many friends and coworkers plan out all of the certifications that they we’re working on. From A+ to CCIE, it seems like each of these people were driven to get that specific cert. I’m sure these people have seen the benefits of their studies. I just can’t seem to find the motivation for myself to get any certs.

I believe he main reason for this is because I have had several different jobs in I.T. over the past few years. A cert that I may have used on my first job wouldn’t have much impact on my current job, or at least not in my opinion. The second reason is that I think technology is changing all the time. My current job has me working on servers, wireless, VoIP, and more. I don’t have the time to get certs in each of those areas (nor is my company going to pay for all of that training). Even if I did get all of the certs needed, by the time I was done with all the studying and testing, I would need to start over again because everything would have changed. I would never get any work accomplished with all of the studying and testing that I would be doing. Finally, my last reason for not getting certs is my own learning style. I learn really well by getting my hands into a project. I need to be able to play with a device and see it working. Of course I’ll read up on anything that I don’t know how to fix, but simply reading through a MSCE book for a test isn’t going to really teach me much. I’m likely to forget about 50-75% of what I’ve read an hour after I put the book down. Thanks to Google, I can find most of my answers within a few minutes.

Not sure how all of this plays into my future of working with I.T. from here on out. My own opinions may very well change in the near future. For the time being I’m willing to stand on my own work and not on a piece of paper.