Certification – Personal Picks – Virtualization

So now, we finally get to the point you all wanted: which certifications should you pursue? There are lots of lists out there that discuss the “hot certs”. I’m not going to do this. Instead, here are the certifications that I think would probably teach you the most, and therefore advance your career in actuality and not just on paper.

Everyone talks about virtualization like it is the new technology that is going to save the world. It’s good, but it’s not THAT good. It is, however, highly disruptive. First, it abstracts the operating system from the hardware. Different virtual technologies do this in different ways, and each one has its own advantages and problems. Learning about this and, in particular, learning how to troubleshoot in this environment will be huge for your future career. Secondly, virtualization merges the networking on the switch level with that of the server. This can be drastically more complicated and understanding how it works is essential to your future.

Consider virtualization another fundamental technology. If you do anything with system administration, you need to understand it. As the various operating systems become increasingly easier to use, the importance of understanding them deeply will wane and the importance of virtualization will increase. That said, the difference between a de-facto admin (deal with break/fix) and a professional admin (plan/build for growth) will continue, it’s just that the role of admin will grow to include the virtual environment as well as the operating systems.

At this time, the technology is undergoing a shake-up with the leading players being VMWare, Citrix/Xen, and Microsoft. The only player with a mature certification program is VMWare, so I would focus there. Keep an eye on Citrix though, as it is likely that they will add Xen to their highly-successful certification line.

(Disclosure: I do not currently possess a virtualization certification)

Certification – Which certifications to pick – Tech Levels

We are exploring key considerations for when you are choosing a certification. Today’s consideration is the disparity between levels of technologies.

So, when you’re looking at a certification you may be forced to choose between new technology and current technology. It can get quite confusing. New technology is bright and shiny, and it is often easy to get the passion to study it. However, the problem with this is your career path may not wind up heading in that direction. New technology is fickle and can change or even vanish before it gets stable enough to become mainstream. Consider the risk. If you think that this technology will be around for at least five years, it may be worth learning deeply enough to get a certification. If not, you should probably keep an eye on it and see where it goes.

Current technology has the opposite problem. It’s easy to tell if it’s on your career path, but since it’s been around for a while, it may be hard for you to get up the passion needed to succeed. Also, you run the risk of deprecation. Many technologies (basic languages in particular) expire after a certain period of time, so by the time a technology stops being “new”, it has also lost a certain amount of it’s lifetime.

Of course, it’s never possible to foresee the future, so in the end, you will just have make a best guess and go with it. However, there are a couple things that you can do to mitigate the risks. First, try to pick a general technology, not something overly specific. The more specific something is, the bigger the risk that you are specializing in the wrong area. That said, don’t pick something so general that it’s so watered down that it is useless. Secondly, you might want to hedge your bets. If you see the industry going down two possible paths, pick a certification in each path. That way, you will gain learning that will help and still have a good story to tell.

Certification – Which certifications to pick – Career Path

We are exploring key considerations for when you are choosing a certification. Today’s consideration is your Career Path.

After all my talk on passion, here is where the practical side has to come forward. It’s well and good to be passionate about something, but if it doesn’t relate to your job, you might not be able to get the full value out of the certification. You also have to consider what the certifications would convey to someone who looks at them. We live in a world where, to be successful, a person has to be good at both doing their job and talking about their job. One of the ways that a person talks about their job is with their job history, also known as a status report, yearly review, or resume.

It is important that your job history tells a story about you, and that that story is the same as the one that you are telling about yourself. For example, if you have been working in IT for over a decade, you might want to say that you have deep experience and can really do your job well, but all you have is a collection of low level certifications, your resume will say that you have no drive and always try to take the easy way out. Similarly, if your job history is focused on one technology, but you are certified in another, you are saying that you can do one thing well, but you really want to be doing something else. This is probably not what you want to say.

It is best to figure out where your career is headed, and pick a few certifications on that path. Be able to explain to anyone who asks why you have that exact certification and what distinguishes it from others in your field. You WILL be asked, and if you do not have a good answer, it weakens both you and the certification in general.

So, take a quick look at the certification you are considering and ask yourself why you want it. If your answer is one of the following, stop and pick a better one:

  • It’s easy to get
  • Everyone has one
  • It’ll get me a good raise

Certification – Which certifications to pick – Passion

We are exploring key considerations for when you are choosing a certification. Today’s consideration is Passion.

As with many things in life, success comes down to passion. If you are a salaried worker, you are likely expected to work 40 hours a week. If you ONLY work 40 hours, that means that you are doing the MINIMUM expected of you. That’s not exactly the quick path to success. Thus, if you want to succeed, you have to be passionate enough about what you are doing to put in 50 hours and have it feel like 30. If you’re really passionate, you can put in 60 hours and have it feel like 20.

This works the same if you are hourly. An hourly employee is expected to get a certain amount of work done in a hour. Thus, your minimum is to do X work for $Y in compensation. If that’s all you do, then you are again meeting the MINIMUM expected of you. To succeed in this model, you have to figure out what X work is, and try to do 2X work in each hour. The only way to work this hard on a consistent basis is to be passionate about that you’re doing.

In most cases, when you start on a certification path, you will not be able to stop your day job. Thus, in either model, you have to do more than the minimum amount of work AND spend the time to learn and prepare for the certification. This is HARD. The only thing that can help is to really WANT it… really badly.

This is where passion comes in. If you are pursuing a new lover, you will throw caution to the winds and devote all your resources towards being with that person. If you are training for a marathon, you will spend many months getting into shape, constantly keeping your goal in mind. Similarly, if you want to get ahead professionally, you have to approach the project with that level of passion. Pick what you like BEST about your job. Pick something that you can eat, breathe and sleep for months. Only when you are at that point and level of interest can you have a strong likelihood of success.

If you have that level of passion, you will get closer to your goal on willpower alone. Sure, you need other things like a rational plan, a schedule, and the support of your friends and family… but if you approach with ONLY conservative rationality, your journey will take so long that you may not even complete it. The passion will be your guide to your goal. The practicality will be the tools that you need to blaze your trail.

So, choose what you are the most passionate about. If you do not, you will likely not have the desire to complete the certification journey.

Certification – Which certifications to pick

So, at this point, you have decided to pursue certification. Good for you. The question that is likely on your mind is “what certification should I pick?”. At this point, a lot of people often fall back on the “more money” thing. It is true that some certifications cost more than others, and those ones are often ranked more highly on a salary survey. So, you need to start by considering salary surveys (which could be a whole other series).

Salary surveys are often sent out to people on a list. This list if often made from people who signed up to take a certification test or who requested the results of a salary survey in the past. This makes such surveys inherently unreliable and skewed in favor of certifications. In the real world, most businesses will not give you a salary increase just because you passed a test. So, if you want to get the salary boost that people think a certification brings, you’ll have to change jobs. At that point, soft skills like negotiation, interviewing technique, and a solid ability to perform the job will impact your salary MUCH more than having passed a test.

To say it more simply, getting certified will not get you rich. Being good at what you do and being good at managing your money will get you rich. Getting certified will just make you better at what you do… if you choose to do it right. So, the next three posts will explore key considerations for when you are choosing a certification.

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Josh More - Entropologist
Expert in removing chaos from
I.T. and business systems.