What is the value of Aruba certification?
For some, certification means the opportunity to add more acronyms to their business card. (I don’t like to have too many acronyms on mine because the ink makes it too heavy to carry around.) For others, it might mean getting or keeping a job. These are secondary and lower reasons. What then is the real value?
Achieving certification should not be a slam-dunk event. If it is, then the exam is too easy and may be considered meaningless because everyone can get the certification label if they want to. An exam should contain a level of inherent challenge to it. This helps to ensure that you know something that someone else doesn’t, and that should subsequently raise your pay! (Well it might if you work for a good company.) As the exam levels increase, this differentiation becomes more apparent as fewer and fewer pass the higher-level certifications. Is that where the value of the exam lies? Well maybe partially, but not entirely.
The real value lies in the time that you invest increasing your knowledge to pass the exam. Hopefully, attaining a certificate means that you acquired a level of knowledge that the exam validated. You may have attended multiple classes, spent countless hours listening to the roar of equipment fans while you practiced configuration and troubleshooting, browsed the internet until late at night trying to find the answer to some technical point that bothered you. (Or maybe you were actually setting up fantasy football teams, but we won’t tell.) The process of gathering all of this information and muscle memory and cramming it into your cranium and fingers is what certification is really about. This differentiates you from the rest of the crowd. This is where the real personal value comes into play. The certification label vindicates that you weren’t really setting up fantasy football, but were really studying hard and now have knowledge of material value to offer your boss or customer.
Our certification development team works hard at defining what skills you need to do your job in an Aruba network. We then build the exam in such a way that you can prove to the rest of the world that you know your stuff.
We also construct education highways to help you get there. We try to ensure that our courseware supports each of the exam objectives so that attending an exam will not take you by surprise. That doesn’t mean attending a class guarantees passing an exam. But it does mean that you have the fundamental resources at hand to prepare yourself for the big day.
So don’t just think of certification as an end goal. Think of it as a process: the process of making yourself more informed and skilled than your neighbor. Then when you pass the certification, you will know that you have the knowledge.