IT Career Guide

Degree or Certification?

What’s more important either the degree or the certification?

Take it from someone with a few degrees myself. Absolutely, absolutely the certifications and the hands on.

And that’s what happened after my fancy degrees, I went to the market. They were like, “Okay. So yeah. Do you have those degrees once we add you to this team, how are you going to be able to add value from day one?”. And I couldn’t answer that. I had very generic, broad, theoretical knowledge that wasn’t necessarily transferable directly to a team. So yes, definitely. Especially nowadays where universities are trying to retrofit an old model into a new era. Basically the credit hour, the 120 credit to get a degree the four year format, the six months semester, it doesn’t work anymore. It’s a old 200 or 300 years old model they’re trying to retrofit in 2021. You see what I mean? And the second problem I see, although some universities and colleges are trying to fix that, is the professor sometimes don’t have the hands on.

And this is the difference in our training center. So all our instructors bring back knowledge that they’ve been doing the same day, they bring that back to the classroom that same night. And you cannot say that for all the professors, they have great knowledge, but sometimes it’s theoretical. They’ve left the corporate world a while ago. So the knowledge transfer from hands on to classroom, there is a lag. There’s usually a lag in terms of years, not hours, just like our instructors. So short answer, the certification and hands on is way more important. Especially in 2021, it’s like an elephant trying to adapt smaller companies like us. We are more agile in general. We can adapt faster, the decision to change or tweak something to make my program more relevant takes days or hours, but it takes months or years for institution like at university or college. So the agility of adapting to what the market needs real time, we have that in terms of advantage on colleges and universities.

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Silvana Zapanta

Sil brings a wealth of experience to her writing and editing projects. After nearly a decade guiding college students in research and communication, she shifted her focus to freelance writing and editing. Her passion for education continues through volunteer work, where she empowers others by teaching research and writing skills.

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