Certifications Worth It?

Hello,

I've been thinking of getting my Microsoft Software Developer
Certifications in C# and WPF. My question is, will this be worth it?
Do employers really care if you have these certifications? I'm seeing
a lot of IT jobs being outsourced to India, and there seem to be fewer
and fewer of them being posted in the US these days. I do have
experience, but if I do get laid off I would like to have an "edge"
over the competition.

Thanks

 

Well, first you need to recognize that certifications are not given in
languages and feature sets.

Certifications are offered based on three development classifications:
Windows Development
ASP.NET Development
Enterprise Application Development
See http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/mcpd.aspx#tab2 for
details.

I hope so! But that depends on the employer. If you find a potential
employer looking for .NET developers and that potential employer is clueless
about .NET developer certifications -- you might want to take a good look at
the calibre of the existing staff you'll be developing with.

Please do not mistake *CODING* jobs with *Development* jobs. A true
application developer (i.e. MCPD) is involved at many stages of the
lifecycle of an application -- and "slinging code" is but a small portion of
that process.

The key to having an "edge" over the "competition" is to be Good At What You
Do.

A second key is to have an actual portfolio of product to demonstrate to a
potential user.

A third key is a certification that says you understand *all* aspects of the
development lifecycle, and not just how to write a webpage.

Corporate America, in fact, has been slowly awakening to the fact that
outsourcing programming to overseas cheap labor doesn't really do much to
reduce costs -- in the end it just shifts the costs into testing/retesting,
lost time due to time zones/datelines, multiple passes to remediate bugs,
and less efficiency in the production of the desired result due to
communications challenges and misunderstood specifications.


--
Lawrence Garvin, M.S., MCITP:EA, MCDBA
Principal/CTO, Onsite Technology Solutions, Houston, Texas
Microsoft MVP - Software Distribution (2005-2009)

MS WSUS Website: http://www.microsoft.com/wsus
My MVP Profile: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Lawrence.Garvin