IT Certification FAQ

A: PhD hands down. CCIE, while it's difficult and can be valuable, is still a vendor certification. It can be difficult to obtain, but in the long run, you PhD will be more valuable.

hsb

The others have suggested the Ph.d and I would agree. I would suggest though that you ALSO work towards completing your CCIE during the 4 years you are preparing for your Ph.d. You should be able to use some of the materials you study for your Ph.d to also help you in some ways for yor CCIE. I am taking this approach myself. I am going for my 3rd Master's degree (the first two are not in the tech field) while at the same time getting as many certs as I can over this next year. I figure it would look better to have the advanced degree AND the certs.

Matt

For the most part I agree with what has been said, with one caveat. What do you want to be doing ten years from now? If the answer is anything like, "I want to be a senior manager," or "I want to be a CTO somewhere," then absolutely hands down, get the PhD.

On the other hand, if your answer is, "I want to still be turning knobs in NOCs," etc. then that changes things a bit. I wouldn't say to not get the PhD, but at the same time, a PhD sort of overqualifies you for the job. And overqualification can often be a bad thing when looking for jobs. You can get turned down because they don't want to pay you what they think you might be asking. So if you want to be an engineer all your life, then pursuing various certs like CCIE might be just as valuable as long as you stay on top of keeping up with your certs. Also if you want to be a knob turner ten years from now, a PhD in *Management* of IT might not be the best choice of degrees to pursue.

This leads me back to the first point. I assume that by considering a PhD in MIT you don't want to be an engineer over the long haul, in which case the degree is the right choice to make over CCIE.

Bernie

source: alt.certification.cisco
added: May 2003

Latest from hardware forums: - Upgrading My Graphics Card And I Have Some Questions Please - Help with booting proplem please - Raid 0 set up - 12v jumping from 11.64 to 11.71 - x2 4800 vs Fx60 - 1 - reading dvd disks in a cd-rom drive - ARGOSY - HD363N - Network Storage - AGP 8x Graphics card in AGP 4x Motherboard compatibility que - M2N-MX power management under XP - product id troubles - Will this cable work with my sun servers? - 1 - Gateway 310X System Restore CD - Outlook PST File Problem - Help Please.... - Replacing a Dell case/CPU fan

Free certification materials:

Free MCSE exams - ExamSimulators.com (they also offer 100% Money Back If You Don't Pass Guarantee - sounds great!)

We recommend CBT Nuggets computer based training. Check out their Free Videos or CD first!