I was having a conversation with a co-worker yesterday, and he brought up some very good points, especially with the CompTia track of certifications.  No matter at what level of IT you work, troubleshooting an issue to resolution will always be present.

 A little back story into this topic…  The conversation I was having yesterday emphasized that I take certain aspects of this job for granted.  Those of us working in this shop have been networkers for around 15 to 20 years, and we had to learn the cutting edge technologies that are now legacy systems.  We learned the rules as the rules were being written, such as cable lengths and attenuation factors, bends in cable and fiber, switching from single mode to multi mode, so forth.  This knowledge I take for granted, and mainly because the people I have worked with over the years grew up with IT the same way I did, as it was first coming out.  Remember when the 10b NIC came out and cost $300, and that was cheap?  The whole gist of this is that we learned fundamentals because at the time, that was all that existed.  There were no real white papers on best practices out there, not at that level anyways.

 Today, fundamentals are a lost art with the new kids on the block.  They are trained to troubleshoot at a high level, but if they are pressed with an issue that is caused by attenuation, they do not even know what that is.

 The CompTia track of certifications is the fundamentals.  I preach about getting education, certifications to prove education and baseline skills to employers, but it does not have to be all high level stuff.  Those 'low level' skills such as knowing connectors and troubleshooting wires, this is no less important in troubleshooting than knowing how to troubleshoot recursion errors in an internal DNS server.  If the equipment cannot talk effectively, it cannot do the job.  Simple stuff, we all know that in the most basic terms.  I do look at CompTia as entry level certifications, but until that conversation I had with a co-worker, I had not thought about the importance of verifying the knowledge of the base systems, such as cabling.

 I am not downplaying getting any certification by any means.  I myself do not place a great deal of emphasis on them other than to see how much effort an individual has put into their own career, but I do not use them to measure knowledge or skills in a particular area very much.  Through having the conversation about the CompTia track of certifications however, I do feel that those tests are more in line with troubleshooting skills that will actually be seen in the real world, as opposed to the MCSE questions that are not real world for the most part.

 The end state is, some folks hold certifications with more weight than others, but regardless of that, it does show that a person has taken the time to further themselves professionally.  That alone speaks more about a person’s character, at least on paper, than most other items on a resume.