This is what I always say when it comes to people matching up certifications with job success:
Personally, I think the order of importance of characteristics of any job candidate is:
(1) Experience - years on the job is worth more than anything else;
(2) Typically a university degree - either in Computer Science or Mathematics;
(3) Certification - this shows you know how to pass a theory exam, and will differentiate you from a candidate with both (1) and (2) but not (3);
(4) Personal skills, attitude and team work ability.
Obviously (4) might be put higher up the list for someone who's obnoxious, and who the interviewer feels just won't fit in!
Don't get me wrong, certifications are great, but they
test only a limited number of questions, and not every topic in the subject. They also sometimes miss the obscurities or quirks of the language, and they don't demonstrate any practical skills. When you get to a job/contract environment, you need to be versed in the theory (which the certification tests), but you also need to be confident with the code and practical aspects - e.g. debugging is a vital skill which you don't learn well just by answering questions; similarly, sensing when
you are doing something wrong against when there's a
bug in your application server is very much an on-the-job skill. Furthermore, you don't really see how the things in
J2EE come together until you actually build applications, make mistakes and learn from them - many a time I have done something really daft, spent hours trying to correct it, and then found I misunderstood some relatively minor detail in the first place! Needless to say, it never happened again.
So by all means persue the certification road - the exam objectives give you a nice framework to work around and build upon. But in my opinion, if you spend two or three years studying and getting good practical experience with the language, then decide to take the exam, you will be better off for it (or alternatively pass the exam first, and then spend a year or so using the language). The exam is actually
easier if you do spend a good deal of time working with the Web tier beforehand.
By the way, without meaning to plug too much, I hope to start distributing my SCWCD book by the end of April.