Are All Professional Certifications Bunk?

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  Career Development  

Okay, I know that all professional certifications aren’t bunk. I know that there are some very real and necessary certifications in the IT world and in many other professions that are absolutely essential to show that you have the knowledge to perform the work at the level necessary to be successful. And even if that’s not exactly the case--meaning your experience and knowledge will carry you through without the certification--you still need it to even be considered a viable option for the work, period.

But do you ever feel like your certification isn’t serving you well? You spent all of that money and the job offers still aren’t pouring in. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: You don’t have the certification but you do have the experience--and yet you’re being weeded out early in the job search process because you’re missing those fancy letters after your name. Welcome to the job hunting world, where certifications seem to be human resources’ way of saying, “I’m going to coast through this job search process!” (Seriously, I sometimes think that certifications are HR’s way of pressing the “easy” button.)

I decided to pose several related questions to project management, IT and business professionals in general. I was looking for was answers to the following questions in order …

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