Are MS Certs worth anything?

[Cowboy Bob]

be able to provide proof that you know the product!

That's one thing that a cert absolutely DOESN'T prove. Knowing a product (any product) only comes with experience and cannot be tought - unless we're talking Word/Excel level. There are always too many idiosynchrosies, tricks of the trade, things that those in the know know, etc etc

[dr_beat]

That's one thing that a cert absolutely DOESN'T prove. Knowing a product (any product) only comes with experience and cannot be tought - unless we're talking Word/Excel level. There are always too many idiosynchrosies, tricks of the trade, things that those in the know know, etc etc

When I did my W2K MCSE track I was shocked at just how little the experienced I have met knew about the product: Windows 2000 Server! To prove a point, the amount of uncertified people that I know who I have worked and am working with at the moment only one of them has ever heard of Sysprep for XP cloning. Company I currently work at has been dishing out cloned images all over the shop onto new laptops etc and when I asked the "experienced" how they get round the issue of duplicate SIDs the "experienced" look at me as if to say "what the **** are you on?"...

Your study method teaches you many tricks of the trade - the best people to go to for the tricks of the trade are the product manufacturers! When I did my W2K MCSE track I used all sorts of sources that included M$ webcasts, M$ white papers, Learnkey and CBT Nuggets CBTs, M$ Training books and finally the W2K, XP Pro and Exchange 2000 resource kits! Now all those materials teach you alot about the product!

However, after saying all that you can't beat a combination of certified and a lot of experience with a product!

[r0bly0ns]

What like getting pissed and running up huge debts??? Hardly life skills IMHO!