RE: CISSP Question

["David Gillett" <gillettdavid () fhda edu>]

April Carson wrote:

> Good points. However if someone was going to invest money 
> into their skills, I would be more impressed with someone who 
> purchased a router and set one up at home. This shows 
> initiative, drive and a willingness to learn.

  Lots of people go over to Fry's and plunk down $40 for a router,
bring it back to the home (or the OFFICE), unbox it, plug it in, and
if it seems to work, they think they're golden.  (If/when it doesn't,
I get called....)  Doesn't demonstrate anything more than that they
used to have $40.
 
> Just because I have a drivers license and drive fast does not 
> mean I am a racecar driver. 

  This seems, to me, to stand the previous paragraph on its head.
If I want to hire a racecar driver, my first choice (and, apparently,
yours) will NOT be somebody with a regular license who drives
fast.  My first choice for a network engineer is not going to be
somebody who (just) plugged in their own router.

> Ultimately, I believe you should find the job you want to 
> have and research what THEY require. If they want a degree 
> and you get a certification then perhaps you wasted your 
> time. I do not believe there is a hard and fast answer to 
> this discussion of degree vs. certification.

  I suspect that problems arise when people (both employers and
employees) try to make certification the answer to the old
question "How do I get experience to qualify for a job, when I 
need a job to get experience?"  Certification is not always the
answer, but there aren't a whole lot of other answers, either.
(Fair disclosure:  The university I went to had a co-op program,
so that significant numbers of graduates completed a four-year 
degree in five years -- with two years of work experience as
well.  So I know that certification is not the ONLY candidate
answer....)

  In particular, bootcamps are routinely marketed on this basis.
If I knew someone had decided that they needed to learn basic
Cisco networking, I'd recommend our local college's Cisco Academy
CCNA track, which is nominally a year with plenty of lab time on
real equipment, over a one-week CCNA bootcamp, even though they'd
wind up with the same piece of paper at the end.  (Community college
tuition in this state is cheap, too; you have to factor in food and
rent to do a real cost comparison, but it's also possible to hold 
down a job while doing the Academy track evenings/weekends.)
  On the other hand, we've just placed an order for some Cisco gear,
not our usual brand.  So we need to get a couple of experienced 
network admins up to speed on IOS quickly.  A CCNA bootcamp will
do that -- perhaps 50% of it will be review of concepts they're
already familiar with (but may not know the Cisco syntax for),
about 25% will be Cisco-specific features not seen before, and 
about 25% will be things like Frame Relay and ISDN which we're
not actually using currently.
  (Part of the problem, of course, is that situations like this
don't happen often enough to support the bootcamp industry (ugh!)
purely off employer needs.  To fill their classes, they have to
market to people who will be paying out of their own pockets.)

  One of the questions that fed into this discussion was something
like "Are certs useful?"  The answer that I'm coming to is that
(a) they can be useful for some purposes, and (b) different approaches
to obtaining them may be more or less useful for the purpose at hand.
  Sorry it couldn't just be "yes" or "no".

David Gillett