Hi Mathivanan,
You should first understand how certifications work from the
perspective of a vendor who offers such certification say Microsoft,
Redhat or SAP. The vendor has an economic interest in selling his
product to a company. The company which buys a product (or a service
in case of Redhat) wants to know if the product/service they buy can
be used by people they are going to employ. This is where the
brilliance of marketing sets in.
They con the students and candidates in the job market that there are
several jobs awaiting them if only clear the certification in their
technology. They then go and talk to all the colleges and institutes
like NIIT and convince them to market the certification and giving
them the necessary materials to make it a course. They then contact
book authors who fill in pages and pages with mind numbing facts about
the technology. The institute in the meanwhile has started tailoring a
course to and claims that it can get you from a dud to a certified
professional in 3 months. As with any statistical distribution in a
country with a billion people, a sizable few take up the
certifications. The first few batches are always tough. Only the good
guys clear the first 3 or 4 batches. But good guys like to share
knowledge. So they share the dumps with the world.
The vendor does nothing to oppose this as they need that pool of
skills in the market. After they have got enough number of people with
the piece of paper with the name of the vendor and a printed signature
of the CEO/founder of the company, the marketing department gets busy
making powerpoint slides. The slides have graph of stating the number
of people who have finished the certification and how easy it would be
for their customers to find the right skills. And since the numbers
(supply) are aplenty and the licensed customers are a few (demand), by
the laws of economics, they should have no problem in finding people
with the right skills (and a cheap pay).
The mindless HR then goes and "recruits" people with certifications.
So if you notice, if you are a good candidate, you can lower your
value just by getting certified. There are alternative means to
improve your employability. You can start contributing to open source
for a start. Do not pick difficult projects. If you cannot find a
project, try building something. Try creating a simple webapp or a
game. I am seeing too many freshers with "Biometric AI-Driven Neural
Network Enabled Grid Based Path Finding World Domination Engine" on
their resumes. And they want me to believe that they did it in 3
months without being able to write fizz buzz in their favorite
language.
As an employer myself, I would recommend you to do the following. Take
up a small project. A small pong game or a simple webapp that solves
your problem and document all your learnings in a blog. This will make
you a better writer and a better programmer. Use open source
technologies. Apart from being the best choice in terms of freedoms
that you get, you also get to interact directly with better
programmers in mailing lists like these.
To pioneer a change, I, on behalf of Artha42 (http://www.artha42.com),
am ready mentor a select group of students every year. Your work will
be entirely open sourced. I promise that you will not write a single
line of proprietary code. That said, we are not google. We are a small
startup with limited resources. We cannot hold something as large as
the Google Summer of Code. But we can do something smaller. If you are
interested in such an internship opportunity, do drop in a line to
careers <at> artha42 <dot> com.
Regards,
Vagmi
http://blog.vagmim.com
?There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the
other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare.