In my last post, I raised the question about the value, if any of Cisco certs for those of us employed by Cisco customers. Certs seem to be a double-edged sword – they imply a level of skill, but then most of us seem skeptical as to what skills and knowledge a person has. I’m going to make a few of my own thoughts today about the value of certs, but more broadly, the value of the skills implied by those certs.
If you look at the middle of the bell curve that depicts the knowledge and skills required for typical networking jobs, specifically Cisco-centric jobs, it seems that the more skeptical view of a person’s inherent value is summarized in this simple question: “What can you do for me – in the next year – that matters to this job?” To be fair, I’m sure hiring managers consider a lot more than just that simple question, and I’m sure managers consider a network engineer’s value to be based on more than their current true skill set. But when I sit back and play skeptic, it seems that it boils down to current skill set – be that certifiable skills, or be that soft skills or business skills, as what somewhat implied by a recent Network World article.
Since it’s Friday, I decided to ramble a bit about the issue, and try and paint a mental image of the issue. In my minds eye, I see the proverbial glass, sitting on a table, and the glass is 50% filled with water. The glass represents the totality of all skills needed to do a job, and the water represents the skills held by a mythical employee (of course, I’ll call him Fred, which readers of my books will recognize as my favorite name to pull out of my hat). Whether Fred’s an external job candidate, an internal job candidate (aka transfer from another group in the same company), or in the current job already, someone’s going to be making objective and subjective judgements about his skills – essentially choosing how full the glass is in Fred’s case. If Fred has half the skills required for the job, the glass is a half full/empty glass.
However, if your mental image now shows a nice neat table, with a half full/empty glass on it, I think it’s the wrong image. My image has the glass surrounded by a lot of spillage all over the table. The spillage represents skills that do not matter to the current job, maybe paper certifications about which Fred’s forgotten everything, certs that indeed confirm Fred’s skill but that don’t matter to the current job, skills he’s learning today but have no applicability to the current job. These may be dinosaur skills – in my case, it could be a large amount of now mostly-useless SNA skills spilled all over the table. The spillage isn’t something that gets wiped up and thrown away – I see it as evidence that someone’s trying to improve, evidence of experience, evidence that they have made effort to build their skills. In particular, I look for evidence that there some purpose and intention behind the skills a person has: did they get this skills solely as a side-effect of their job, or did they learn some of the skills by seeking out other opportunities – by taking on additional unrequired job tasks, or volunteer jobs, ot by seeking certs outside a past job’s current job requirements.
OK, sure, that was a bit of a ramble – but I don’t get to do that in the books I write, so I apologize for being so self-indulgent today. However, I’ll close with a related question to ask for your opinions. With my imagery, consider Fred’s half-full glass, and Barney’s 3/4 full glass, and they’re both external job candidates. You’re the hiring manager. Is there any amount of spillage around Fred’s glass, relative to Barney’s spillage – essentially, their skill sets that aren’t going to help you reach your business goals in the next year – that makes you pick Fred over Barney? (You don’t have to use my analogy when you reply, but feel free…)
Next week, back to the guts of CCNA topics – I’ll most likely pick up with NAT again. Have a good weekend…
