[masraum]

Originally Posted by widebody911

I've been in IT for 30 years (get off my lawn!), so take what I say with a grain of salt. I started my professional career coding in COBOL, C/C++ and Assembler (x86 and M88k)

Security is hot - and always will be - and a lot of other guys are headed that direction. "Cloud" is also really hot, but again, a lot of people are getting on that bandwagon too.

The problem with spending your energy (and money!) on certs is you're hitching yourself to someone else's wagon - you live or die by the market share of that platform.

Most of the "certified in everything" people I've known can't function outside of a particular vendor's walled garden.

The most successful IT guys I know have diverse backgrounds and don't have certs in anything; they've learned in the trenches to be able to be competent in a wide variety of disciplines.

Excellent point. I see certs potentially as a way to get your foot in the door. Getting hired into IT with a good salary with no experience isn't easy. If you can get a couple of certs, many (not all) folks will throw some questions at you to try to figure out if you've retained anything and then may give you a shot. With no experience and no certs, you may have a tough time even getting started.

I got a few Cisco certs way back at the beginning. I'm pretty sure they all expired almost 20 years ago. Several years back, a middle manager said "I want everyone certified." I went and got the Cisco CCNA. Come end of the year I could say "you asked for it, here you go." We never heard about that again. That manager is long gone, and the managers since have all said "I don't GAF about certs as long as you can do the job." But when I was first getting started, I got jobs because I had certs.