Certifications – I Did It
More than two weeks after Dennis Howlett’s initial post on certifications on SDN “Should you be certified?” the debate is still rolling. Yesterday we saw two new posts, one from Dennis and another from Blag on the subject.
I have come to realize that among the SAP Mentors, I am one of the few who actually is certified. (SAP NetWeaver ABAP Web AS 6.40 developement consultant or something like that)
I am usually not someone who cares about certifications, I don’t even hold a university degree or any other higher education for that matter. The reason why I chose to get certified was the chance of getting a job.
I went from web/graphic design to form design and from there on realized that learning ABAP probably wasn’t such a bad idea. With that I also knew if I chose to get certified I would most likely get a junior position at a company I really wanted to work for. The certification was not important for this company because it told them I knew something, but because it showed them that I really wanted to work with this.
I looked around for a place to take a couple of courses and do the certification and ended up choosing a private (SAP partner) school in Cologne. They also offered much more than TAW10/12, making it into more of an education than only a certification.
I sat through 4 months of the 6-month program, before I decided I’d had it. I have never in my life experiences something so sloppy and boring. One teacher sat with us for weeks and just read through the PDFs, not being able to answer any of our questions. We had another dude who couldn’t even pronounce things correctly and who was teaching courses he had never done or covered technologies he had never worked with himself.
In all those 4 months we only had one teacher who actually knew what he was talking about and he only came in as a replacement for a week after we had thrown out one of the other (horrible) teachers. I ended up refusing to pay the whole fee and took the certification through my employer-to-come instead of through the institute.
The certification itself wasn’t hard. I had tons of documents with the questions and answers, so I just locked myself in my room for 2 weeks and learned the right answers by heart, travelled to Walldorf, sat down for 2 hours, and except for a few surprise questions I hadn’t seen before, it was a piece of cake. (albeit a very expensive piece of cake)
The problems with this as I see it are:
- The quality of the courses, both when it comes to teachers and material is poor.
- SAP needs to be much stricter when it comes to partner training institutes.
- New certifications or at least change them more often. What is the point when all the answers can be downloaded off the internet?
How much of what I learned have I used up until now?
Maybe 10 %.
Which just shows me that the certifications aren’t really relevant to the work we are doing.
I agree with Léo Apotheker when he says SAP’s job is to certify and not to recommend people. But to encourage customers to only hire certified consultants is certainly not the way to go. At least not as long as the certifications are in it’s current state.
4 Responses to “Certifications – I Did It”
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Monty Kalsi on February 11th, 2009
Ann,
I agree with your post here. During my career as an SAP consultant, I have seen excellent non-certified SAP consultants and at the same time poorly performing certified SAP consultants.
The problem is that certifications alone do not guarantee that you will perform well. And most of the SAP certified institutes rely on folks who are good on instructions but don’t have the real life experience.
Simply because folks with real good experience and understanding of SAP prefer to do consulting as opposed to training.
Like Fays mentioned above it is the real life project experience and enrichment that creates a good consultant and value to the client. So the question then becomes how you tap the knowledge of an experienced consultant to enrich the learning of another.
As I feel consultants can provide the best training and knowledge if it is easy enough to do and there is a financial incentive to do the same.
It is for this reason, I started SpinAct to share and redistribute one’s knowledge in a productized way.
See my earlier post on this:
http://blog.spinact.com/knowledge_as_a_service/2008/11/users-rate-sap-consultants-and-partners-online.html
Look forward to having you all on SpinAct as we build the Knowledge Marketplace of the future.
http://www.spinact.com/account/signup
Best,
Monty
Fays on February 6th, 2009
I have had a similar experience Anne.
I took the SOA 200 training, which is rather conceptual, as it relates to Enterprise Architecture.
For this course, we had two guys doing the training. One, which is a colleague, and he’s fine, he knows his job. For 2.5 days we’ve learned interesting stuff. And then we had another guy, from a partner consulting company.
This guy had no damn idea about what he was talking about. At a point, he ended up showing us his own slides instead of the regular training content. It was a great waste. And the training was given within SAP.
I wondered if it was me, as I had a rather good knowledge of the area, or did the other participants have the same feeling. I was conforted to have a similar feedback.
SAP Training’s excuse: course is too recent, there are not enough people who master these things.
The certification in itself assesses your capacity in assessing information learned and reusing it. But I think, what people might expect from a training is above what’s in the book and comes from the trainer’s experience. That’s the real enrichment that allows you to get sometimes better at doing a specific task, as you take advantage from this experience. But this is definitely not written in the certificate.
yojibee on February 6th, 2009
Might be that it is not 100% fair.
But I also don’t think it is 100% fair to ask someone to pay 7.000 Euros for a training and then don’t deliver. The quality of the education was so bad, I have really only been able to use around 10% of what I learned. Out of 15 in my class, only 4 ever got certified and I am the only one who works with SAP today.
Of course SAP can’t take the whole blame for this, but they have certified this institute for these kinds of trainings.
There is certainly room for some improvement here.
Frank Koehntopp on February 6th, 2009
Not sure if that’s 100% fair – the certifications and trainings are created to suit a wide group of people.
I passed the 2004 Netweaver Security Certification, and I’d say I have used at least 80% of what was in the underlying trainings (ADM940, ADM950, ADM960).
There sure is a wide variety of courses and certifications, and not all will work for all kinds of people. Finding and taking the ones that do is the real challenge.
And the only valid certification you can get is through customer feedback (also true for trainers, btw.).
Unfortunately that is a lot harder to transport in a certificate…