At my last job the big push was to get everyone certified. Honestly, the company really didn’t care if you knew how to do the work, they just like to brag that all of their employees were certified. I took classes, and I boned up with study manuals. I passed tests too. Though, to this day if I had to recall much of it, I couldn’t. I can program. That’s something I can do. I’ve been doing it for 27 years (I’m not that old, I started when I was 11). My last several jobs were programming jobs. Yet, when I went on interviews, I was constantly being asked to take these tests to prove I could code. Granted, I know there are a lot of script monkeys out there who manage to do okay writing little scripts and such, and they want to weed out the casual coder from the hardcore programmers. Still, I hated being treated like I didn’t know what I was talking about when I had done this for how many years. So, what did I have to go and do? Get certified.

I guess my big gripe is not certification in general, but the move Corporate America has made to have *everyone* certified. That whole idea that it’s not good enough for you to do your job, but you have to have a piece of paper to prove it.

Oh, and the fact that all of it COSTS so much. Seriously, thousands of dollars for classes, hundreds of dollars for study materials, and two or more Ben Franklins at a crack just to take the test. Frankly, I think it’s a big conspiracy to make all of these testing companies richer. But, hey, that’s just me.