CF Dead? MS Cert Questions. India Anyone?

[TracyTrace]

Hey Guys (Chicks Included),

My tech background has been mostly web programming. Cold Fusion and ASP primarily with SQL Server and Oracle 9i. VB way way back in the day also. In total about 10 years on the web. Done a lot of Project Management also but decided to go back to coding when I moved here to get a feel for the lay of the land.

I won't mention where I moved from incase I get the same reaction I did previously. Just focus on the questions please.

Anyhoo, I'm feeling like my skillset could use a little (lot) of tweaking so I'm considering geting Microsoft certified in .NET. Cold Fusion seems to have had its day apart from in a few niche sectors like advertising so I'm thinking its time to jump on the C# .NET bandwagon. Seemed like a reasonable progression.

Except they've changed their certification process - http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mc...n/default.mspx and I can't make heads or tails of it.

So I'm considering the MCPD - http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mc...v/default.mspx

QUESTIONS

1.But I don't know if the certs(MCPD/MCTS/MCSD) are worth the paper they are printed on and what these certs count for out here. According to an earlier post on here today .NET jobs are drying up in the city. Please tell me I'm wrong. And is £250 really the daily rate for them?

2. And as I really just want to get trained quickly in C# should I even bother with gettting certified? If not, does anyone have free time and feel like doing some one-on-one training? I just don't want to have to rely on books completely.

3. What training schools would you recommend out here? Some of the courses I've seen are ridiculously expensive and I'm leery of 3 day workshops. My brain cells aren't as sharp as they used to be.

4. Has anyone been to/considered going to India for training. I keep seeing a school called Koenig pop up when I search. Anyone heard of them or others? http://www.koenig-solutions.com/trai...FTqGFQodZnlruQ

Any and all feedback would be appreciated except for the 'Go Back To Where You Came From' variety. Although I'm starting to thing that's just an initiation thing for these boards

[oraclesmith]

I'm not much up on Microsoft technologies, but I believe the low rates, the devalued certifications and the Indian training schools are all part of the same problem. India is churning out hundreds of barely trained but certificated VB/C# .Net programmers through these training schools and flooding the market. I suppose they, along with the software firms and the budding programmers themselves, have just caught on to way of getting big chunks of outsourced work, focussing on a common set of MS technologies.

"The graduates have been transported to the Infosys Global Education Centre in Mysore, India, for a 16-week intensive programming course and two further months of work experience at one of the many development centres the company operates."

... from the CUK news item http://www.contractoruk.com/002814.html

[oraclesmith]

The scale of this training effort is huge :- http://australianit.news.com.au/arti...-15317,00.html

The intention is to keep these trainees in India, doing outsourced work for Indian levels of pay, but inevitably a lot end up looking elsewhere. And of course if the outsourcers are focussed on MS technologies, then that's where the rates drop.

When I started out, my first employer provided barely three weeks of training, so I envy anyone bagging four months immersion training.

[Cowboy Bob]

To be honest, I doubt most people would be likely to look at certificates when considering hiring a contractor. They want to know about experience and what projects you've done.

I find that if I don't have industry experience in an area, that contributing to/running a project on somewhere like http://www.sourceforge.net gets you at least in the door as people can review your code/try out your application. This is worth much more than a certificate IMO which really tells the client nothing.

For example, I've been thinking about adding J2ME to my skillset for a while. Getting a certificate seemed like a waste of time, so I created a reasonably complex Sudoku game - http://sourceforge.net/projects/mobilesudoku - which will tell any client more about my J2ME abilities than anything else, since they can download it and use it.

[_V_]

Have to agree with CB.

Since it is probably web development (ASP.NET & C#) that you wish to move to from CF, best bet is to:

1. Get hold of VS.NET 2005 & SQL Server 2005
2. Start creating web sites/web services/web applications using these technologies.

You can then showcase your work on the web to clients.

[Asterix]

Missed the boat/train

I think you are 2 or 3 years too late to jump on the .NET bandwagon (if there was ever one). I wouldn't bother spending any money on .NET certification either, literally not worth the paper etc.

[weemster]

.NET Skills

I suspect not !!!!

[dork]

Yeah.. I got .NET MCSD 3 years ago.. no asks about it or considers it useful and I still get moronic "technical questions" at interviews... For godsake, my project manager got an MCSD at the same time with absolutely no coding experience. MCSD is so broad with no depth and it is easy to remember the facts... especially with all those illegal brain dumps out there..

Still, it got me trained quickly.

I am looking at the new Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist exams.. I think the industry might be more interested in these more specialist and in depth certifications... anyway, I just like the stylish badges you get...

[mcquiggd]

The tough one seems to be the Architect exams - as long as you have to specify WHERE you take them - doing it in a corrupt tulipe hole like india would mean a bunch of you or your co-workers end up certifying yourselves.

As for Koenig - it seems to be the 'Guaranteed Certification For Dummies'.

As an earlier poster mentioned, it's all being devalued by the indians etc trying to kid people they can actually replace western workers who have years of experience, for a cheaper price.

[dork]

Hey.. maybe we should use the term "Indians" for IT cowboys.