Heh, I took your walls of text and make they wallier!!
Anyways I remember those times too, it was ridicules. I don't see any problem stretching the truth on your resume... I would advise against lying though, heh.

I remember classing up my resume to get a programming job at cisco early on by throwing down there all the work I did with open source projects. One was apache, and I stated all this fantastic stuff I had done, and it was all true but accomplishing those was literally like 10 lines of code. None of those being critical bug fixes or anything either.


There is nothing I hate more than lacking APIs and documentation. I was complaining about OpenSSLs fluffty API documentation but I have never once went into a job in any field of IT and found decent documentation.

Like Radioshack uses this ass old POS. I was preparing an upgrade path plan and was going to pitch a contract offer to them. First off they don't even have documentation on the source, the source is all c, it has never been properly cleaned up. There is no documentation at all, even the in-code comments are terrible. I walked away.

Cisco had documentation but it was fairly unkept. Last time updated was a few years back, they had put out an entire new platform of routers and switches on a new platform of IOS in that time.

Every IT department I worked in had fluffty documentation. You would be lucky if they wrote down anything but license keys, and even then those were often missing. I know I updated several peoples documentation in my time, last year I went back to a business as a consultant that previously I had acted as coordinator and had from scratch documented nearly everything. Not a single update, they had a director and 2 coordinators since me and none of them even bothered with documentation.

it's not necessary though. a resume is pretty much just to get their attention. it's not something that is supposed to document your life's work. it's supposed to show why you'd be a good candidate to be considered for the job.

If anyone is still interested I believe I'm going to go for a CCNA then CCNP just because that track seems to be one of the sexier ones out there for IT jobs. I've been looking at CAPM, since I don't have the experience as a manager required for a PMP, but have heard it may not be worth it.(I realize that's not exactly an IT cert but many in IT have a PMP)

The Cisco certs are pretty useful. I am just glad I got mine prior to them making it 3 years renewal, but sounds like they made renewal really easy.

Anyways good choice.

PMP/CAPM is pretty useless sides going for a project lead job via internal posting. Also more often then not with PMP and the reason many in IT get them is because the company pays to get you certified. That's also the reason they are so incredibly catch22y. CAPM is like the precursor but from what I seen no one cares about them as much and most project lead jobs are internal postings only.

PMP from my experience is more useful and one of the few certs that get used from company to company. So a company wants to become involved in a project where companies are going to work together, as a sign to the other companies you have put someone in-charge that can handle it, they should be certified. I don't recall the test being difficult at all, I think it's more about proving you have the experience.

Nothing will hurt if you get the CAPM, I just don't know how effective it is or useful it is. In my experience I don't think it would have any meaning. Of course different companies in different markets will have different ideas on what they want.

i'll take a step back and say that, were i inclined to get a cert of any sort, it would almost certainly be cisco based. it's one of those scenarios where "locking yourself into a vendor" isn't so bad, since it's kind of the end-all be-all of networking fluff.

Get your CCNA and ITIL Foundations and you will get looked at. Then when u get a job get your CCNP under security or VOIP (your company will pay for it) and jobs will come to you. Getting your CCNP without experience wont mean a thing. CCNA is more broad and will give u the experience you need to chose where u want to specialize in.

Not only that Juniper and Cisco are pretty similar in commands, management, and architecture.
The learning curve from learning one to learning the next is like a weekend of studying.

Also of course the underlying technology is the same.

Cisco and Juniper make up basically 100% of routers and probably easily 50% of high end smart switches used in enterprise networks.

For the record I do already have a job. I worked at CenturyLink as a tier IV data repair tech that involved going around and fixing customers in multiplexers and aggregators(mostly rebuilding cross connects/re-enabling ports/building aggregator profiles and whatnot) for 3+ years but being low in seniority meant I was pulling graveyard shifts. Now I work for the government as a telecom specialist which is a lot less tiresome but the pay isn't fantastic for all of the hats I have to wear so this defo isn't going to be my permanent job, been doing this for about a year. Getting certs is all just prep for future jobs to make my resume look sexier and possibly be in a better position to demand better pay etc...

You went the right way with Cisco. As I said let your employer pay for any business related certs.

If you want to round out your certs grab the Comptia ones, they are cheap with easy renewal or none at all. While aren't impossibly uber they would at least be more fodder for your certs folder.

Oh also
http://www.engadget.com/...teps-down-degree-scandal/

Don't lie on your resume ;p
Proof that even CEOs are not immune.

oh he finally stepped down :P last i heard it was still being debated over whether he should be fired or not.

just for fun, another idiot that shouldnt have lied on a resume:
http://en.wikipedia.org/...orge_O%27Leary#Notre_Dame

yeah. i was glad to be a ga tech student right about then :P made us look *great* :P

I was pretty sure Yahoo was going to smooth it over for him actually, Yahoo is hurting and 3 CEOs in such a short time won't help much.

Cisco certification would be nice if you can get a job as a Cisco Engineer. But as a windows sys admin (not a network engineer) i always considered cisco to be backwards and overly complicated in their administrative methods (and yes i can use a command prompt).

Where i am, Cisco roles have always been very hard to break into unless you happen to know someone who JUST HAPPENS to have a spot open. Usually the companies big enuff to use cisco would also want some kind of minimum experience so to me just doing cisco certification of your own bat could just be a massive waste of money.

I have a friend who is now getting into cisco certification. He started life just doing support with a company which i think hes been with for about 7-8 years now and is moving into more senior roles and his company is putting him through cisco certification.

Didn't really read the thread that much but-

Really depends what level of job you're trying to get. If it's entry level just get your foot in the door and get some experience and build some more specific skillsets based on where you want to proceed further.

When I was working my employers would constantly pay for my (and my colleagues) certifications as it would increase our overall marketability as a company.

Though tbh I realized everyone either had something on the side, was trying to get something on the side or was getting ready to move out and do something on their own.

Oh and I know this sounds bad, but unless it's a large company and more specifically defense based companies most employers aren't going to verify if you have a certain certification or not.

If you actually can BS your way out of it, feel free to put down some certifications if will get you past the first round screening and land you an interview. The interview is where you need to shine - not necessarily resume padding.

After talking with the network engineers and the people who make 90k+ in my building doing IT(mostly contractors) I've found a few interesting tidbits. Namely:

-All Federal government IT employees are pretty much required to have a Security+ cert(which is good as I already have this) and that this is starting to trickle down to the state level for higher end jobs.

-CISSP will almost always get your resume at least seriously looked at if you have it.(A little background that may bias this though, where I work they pay for 1 person from the agency to get this training + exam every year determined by the CIO and that slot is highly sought after here)

-CCNA likely won't get you looked at for anything other then entry level jobs, but you should still get it as a stepping stone to CCNP as that will get your resume looked at for mid level networking jobs

On another note I'm taking my computer science program's database course this semester. The professor seems to think that while it wouldn't help me pass any entry level administrator courses because they deal with knowing the vendor's software. I'd likely be able to pass a Master/Architect SQL cert exam after this course if I did well and understood the material. Debating this as there don't appear to be any "useful" or authoritative DB certs out there since MS has changed their system and Oracle has a different cert track for every single product they have ever offered :P

CCNA is just like the rest of the entry level certs, it's fodder. It's good fodder though and cheap and easy to maintain.

Vendor specific DB isn't a big deal. Most large go oracle. In the end it's still just SQL.

There aren't as many certs going down the software development side which is kind of where DB stuff falls into. Although obviously its sort of a hybrid area.

DB classes can be interesting though, but very boring most of the time. SQL is not used that much raw by non-programmers or DB staff(such as architect or maintainers) usually they write programs to do stuff too. Most of the time internal tools are written in PHP, but I guess it's what the staff want to write it in or are comfortable with.

I am not sure how much a DB cert is worth, but I guess a basic one wouldn't hurt. Oracle fluffing suck, period. I hope they die.

hmmm, i've been moving the majority of my code from VBA into T-SQL so i could have a thinner client and let the server handle the logic instead of the client. meh, i forgot what Orkin wanted to do.