Certifications or Experience

[sunil chow]

Hi All,

which can earn you better bucks, certifications or experience?
or both Please comment.....

Regards

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Success is the result of good judgment
good judgment is the result of experience and
experience is often the result of bad judgment

[Svend Rost]

This has been discussed alot of time here - try to search the forum.

In the general case:

Real work experience > certifications

But certifications has it's value, i.e. you have a proof that you can
technology X. It's optimal, if you get your certifications while working.

/Svend Rost

[Dharam Singh]

Yes.Certifications are good for starters and for promotions too sometimes.

Regards
Dharam(Original)

[Prasanna Diwadkar]

It is experience that will earn you more money.
Thanks
Dharam
-(Before the Original)

[Theodore Casser]

To agree with the others who've already commented, experience always (in my opinion) trumps certifications. It's nice to have the papers, but they're meaningless unless you can back up the skills with proof that it wasn't just the product of studying.

Then again, I feel the same way about degrees - that they prove knowledge, but not practical application thereof - so it all depends.

[sunil chow]

Hi All

Thanks for your comments...

Just one more add-on question after one gets an exp. of say around 3+ years
in the industry should he bank on his exp. to get a good pay hike or should he add few certifications to get that extra money.... or the hike entirely depends on his current pay.. Any recommendations/thoughts

Regards
----------
Success is the result of good judgment
good judgment is the result of experience and
experience is often the result of bad judgment

[Joe Richard]

Certifications are a good reinforcment that you know something. They also help with promotions if your employer values that certification.
My opinion is when it is all said and done experience is the best thing to have. You will earn more money based on experience than with certifications. Usually when you get the experience if you take a certification test you can pass with a high score with very little extra study time.
I have heard that passing the SCJP is viewed as 1 year of experience.

[Deep Arora]

Well I agree that certification is not an replacement of experience but experience is also not an replacement of cerification either isnt it.

And I still do not understand this either or debate going on in various forums I why you cant have both experience can come only with time but believe me if you have certification and you are also gaining project experience, your approch towards any design deision or implementation will be much diffrent and most likley far superior than if you had not earned it.

I remember when I earned UML OOAD certification all of a sudden entire project life cycle start appearing to be entirely difrent you gain additional and impressive distinctions to perform the job hence the results are more likely than not to be better.

many can bake a cake but some really do much better than the rest , here we are trying to measure something like quality in terms of hard numbers e.g. salary hike, cert==years of experience I really question that yardstick with no offense intended to any one.

[Mohit Agarwal]

Hi,

I am SCJP , and what i feel that the knowledge gained during the process of
preparing these certs is what that matters.

Many a times, there are small tid-bits whcih one is un-aware of and came to know about them only while preparing .

I take these certs as a way of improving as well as augmenting my knowledge-base.

Mohit.

[vipul patel]

I belive that experiance is what that teaches you some real world IT. I have worked on many projects and I have observed that most of them follow the same pattern for perticular market segment. so whenever new project comes in, I do quick customizaiton of available source code base. If you do not have this experiance then just being SCJP will not make you to design real projects.

But I agree that when you are preparing for certification,you come across lot of technical things which are never exposed in your specific projects. so it is just a technical knowledge enhancement which adds value to your work.