i work with AIX, therefore my clients are always big companies (mostly banks) with big datacentres. I have none of these fancy certifications*) but i have a project record going back more than 30 years.

Would i (or, rather my business) profit from having all these certifications? I don't think so, but i have provable experience compensating for this. I suspect that for younger colleagues the situation is different.

Personally i think this certification industry is helping nobody except themselves. Instead of finding out if (and further certifying that) a person is capable of doing certain tasks the tests simply question factual knowlege. Now, suppose you are ill and need a doctor: would you want one who can name every bone in your body correctly, but has no idea about "therapy" or one who knows how to cure patients but has to look up the name of some bones in case they are involved? A person who can name all binaries in /usr/bin without error does not necessarily have the knowledge about how to use these to achieve a certain goal - and even if he does he might not have the wisdom (read: experience) to distinguish between a good solution and a bad one. **)

Certification testing, if it should really mean something, should be done in the same way academic testing is done: you get a problem description, create a solution for it and an expert or team of experts judge what you have done. They do not give you some multiple choice tests and after testing positive on 30 of these you are a physician. Of course, this would mean that the certification business would be a lot less profitable than it is now, because it would involve actual work on the part of the certifiers. But as their intent (like any capitalistic business) is not to deliver the best possible work but to make as much money as possible this has no realistic chance of becoming reality.

bakunin

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*) actually this is not entirely true: i once was a certified MCSE ("Minesweeper Consultant & Solitaire Expert") because of a bet between me and a colleague from the Windows team. I was decertified 2002 because of prolongued disinterest in getting re-certified on my part. And i am still in business despite Microsoft writing me a letter which pictured my professional future without the certification in very dark colours.

**) the distinction is not good solutions work, bad ones don't because things that don't work are not solutions at all. A good solutions works AND is easy to maintain, well structured, uses the least possible resources, etc., etc. - a bad solution is a working kludge.