Computer Careers Book
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Borland Certifications
Borland certifications now have these 11 tracks:
Borland AppServer
Borland Enterprise Server - AppServer Edition
Borland Enterprise Server - VisiBroker Edition
C#Builder
C++Builder
CaliberRM
Delphi
JBuilder
Kylix
Together Technologies
VisiBroker
These are the current certification exams:
Borland Enterprise Server 5 - AppServer Edition Product Certification
Borland Enterprise Server 5 - VisiBroker C++ Edition Product Certification
Borland Enterprise Server 5 - VisiBroker Java Edition Product Certification
C++Builder 6 Studio Product Certification
C#Builder Essentials Product Certification
CaliberRM 5 Product Certification
Delphi 7 Studio Product Certification
JBuilder 8 Product Certification
JBuilder 9 Product Certification
StarTeam 5 Product Certification
Together 6 Technology Certification
The rules for each exam are in the study guides. You can get the study guides here:
http://www.borland.com/services/certification/studyguide/index.html
Their training course schedule is:
http://www.borland.com/services/training/schedule.html
They recommend you take the Essentials or Enterprise course for the certification you are shooting for.
Surviving and thriving through down times
(Note: I started this article in mid-2003, before the release of
statistics revealing that the economy is in a major upturn. I
didn't realize it'd take me so long to write :) I'll update it
for the beginning-to-boom economy of early 2004 later.)
Time to get serious and raise the question -- in light of today's economy, does it even make sense for anyone to change to a computer career?
I wrote my book Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career in 1999, when everybody and their brother was paying $5000 and up to get an MCSE, CNE or other certifications guaranteed by training schools to make them rich -- or at least get them into jobs paying $60,000 a year.
When I began that research back then, my main concern quickly became the mucho dinero that IT training schools were charging students. $5000 for an MCSE was cheap. Eventually they started offering some bargain packages (say, for a set price you got not only your MCSE, but an A+ and CNE also -- of course, it's easier to offer students all those classes than for one person to actually understand and remember all the details necessary to pass all the required exams.
When the new MCSE for Windows 2000 came out, the computer schools again raised their prices to $7000+. They've also been adding Oracle, Network+ and other certifications.
I'm not instinctively stingy, but I've lost enough money to business scams of various kinds that I am wary of being burned again and such high prices just seemed excessive -- on a par with "no money down" real estate "boot camps." Some of the attendees do go on to profit from what they learn, but most could have gotten the same information for a much cheaper price.
Especially when I went to some local superbookstores and found at least five thick tomes (that is, from at least five separate publishers) devoted to each certification or -- often -- each separate exam.
So my thought was, why not just buy (and study!) one of these books? Yes, at $50-60 each they are expensive books, but they are much cheaper than the courses. Are the courses really worth 100 times the price of a book?
Actually, I'm sure there are many people who can learn in a classroom hands-on situation from a good instructor who is there to answer questions, but who just could not slog through the thick books for love or money. Yet some people were probably paying $5k to be bored and slowed down in a classroom, yet thinking they needed this type of training, when they could just as easily have passed the tests from self-study of the books or the slightly more expensive tapes or CD-ROM courses.
So the real question was, how much was a CNE or MCSE really worth? Back then in 1999 they were worth a lot for people with prior experience in networking, and perhaps a foot in the IT industry door for people without any such experience.
The experts I consulted all agreed that the certification craze was just that and what companies wanted was people who could do the job -- paper or no paper.
An article published in the St Louis Post-Dispatch was instructive. Although the headline claimed that certifications were worth a lot of money, the article itself had more depth. The reporterinterviewed two IT pros with a CNE or MCSE.
Yes, they had benefitted from the certifications they held, but analyzing their stories was just further proof that the hype from the training schools was just that -- hype.
One person in the story was a former policeman who'd gotten into networking in the early 90s. He passed his CNE exams a few years later and now (in 1999, remember) was making good money. A woman had been in networking for several years, got her MCSE then got promoted.
Whoopie. One guy was smart enough to get into IT years before it was fashionable and to get his CNE back when few other people qualified for one. A woman with networking experience got promoted with the help of the MCSE.
Good for them -- but how did their stories help the average Joe or Jane who had no formal IT training but who hated their current jobs and who were being told by computer schools that an MCSE was the magic passport to $60K a year?
The upshot was, qualifying for a CNE, MCSE or other certification in a field in which you have experience was -- and is -- a smart career move. Not all techies want to be bothered, but for the ambitious, certifications are worth the time and money.
However, if you have no IT experience, passing tests is not going to qualify you for $60K a year or anything close to it. Maybe it did back in 1995, but not by 1999 and certainly not in 2003 or beyond.
I was told by a rep at the local Sanford Brown College about 2000 that they successfully placed about 90% of their MCSE graduates on local Help Desks. Where they went from there, depended on the individual. Some did great, others not so well.
In March 2000, the US officially entered a recession. We're officially out of it, by the way -- but jobs are a lagging indicator. That means that techies were not laid off at once in March 2000, but that cutbacks did start rolling back the IT job situation by late 2000. Since then, many techies have lost their jobs, others work at lower-paying duties at half or less the salaries they made in 1999 and new and laid-off techies have found it extremely difficult to find jobs.
However, I am writing this in late 2003 (it's taking longer than I expected, so I can't give a precise date), and so the real question is, Is a computer career a smart thing to enter now?
I certainly hope that it is for young kids, because my niece is currently a sophomore at an ivy league college, majoring in Computer Science, and she expects to do as well as she deserves with her brains. I'm not sure that she's figured out yet that brains are good but not enough, that even smart people face difficult problems, or that smart corporate employees in technical positions are just ergonomic chairs and forklift trucks to the people in power in a corporation (that is, tools to be used, depreciated and discarded when no longer worth repairing) and that therefore she should also learn business skills and viewpoints.
After all, I'm only her uncle -- what do I know? She'll just have to learn about life the way the rest of us did, and I hope for her sake it won't be too painful, and maybe she'll someone go through her computer science career without much difficulty.
My real concern is with the people much like myself -- past our early young adulthood, who hate our current jobs and are thinking of changing to a computer career. That's who I wrote my book for, obviously.
In a way, the very depth and extremity of the IT employment crisis is a good thing for anyone thinking to enter the industry now -- there's no way to know how many thousands of techies have left the IT industry in the past 3 years. Some are still on unemployment, living off their parents and spouses. However, many others have found other jobs and likely won't leave those.
Computers are NOT going away -- in case anyone hasn't noticed. They're going to become smaller, faster, smarter, more networked but less wired, more flexible and more ubiquitous and less noticeable than ever. There's scarcely a company in business that doesn't need to use a computer if only to keep its books. Companies just cannot compete these days without making full use of technology.
I don't know if it's true or not, but I've read that one reason Wal-Mart is now the top USA retailer and K-Mart is virtually bankrupt goes back to the early 80s and the beginning use of personal computers.
In both companies, smart young executives told their respective CEOs they needed to buy a lot of these new-fangled gadgets to track inventory and other costs. Both CEOs told the young executives to cram it -- those PCs cost too much. At K-Mart, that was the end of the story. The executives wanted to keep their jobs, so they kept their mouths shut.
Sam Walton, however, was stingy but known to keep an open mind, so his
young executives did not give up making their case. They finally
convinced him to experiment with computerization. It saved Wal-Mart money and suddenly Wal-Mart could price products way lower than K-Mart.
So although large companies are going to squeeze techies to get as much
work and productivity out of them as possible, they aren't going to try
to do without any techies at all unless they're suicidal.
Is the economy recovering? That to me is the real issue, since once the
good times return, so will demand for techies, though it may be years
and another boom before the crazy times when 1999-manna falls from heaven again.
Of course, out-sourcing is a big concern for many IT professionals, especially programmers. Traditional programming can be done more cheaply by foreigners in such countries as India, China, The Philippines etc, where there are huge numbers of technically trained programmers who've been educated in English and for whom one-third of an American programmer's salary is a huge income. Beats serving noodles on a local street corner.
This is nothing new. In St. Louis, then-named Mercantile Bank beat the W2K storm by having its legacy COBOL code modified by programmers in India.
However, few American techies appreciate the irony. This out-sourcing is viable only because of the Internet and other technologies which they helped pioneer and build.
Thus, capitalism and technology continue to grow the world's wealth by the continuous process of destroying the past, and there are always those who are displaced in the process.
American techies as a whole felt that the middle-management "downsizing" lay-offs which began in the eighties were an inevitable result of the advancement of technology. Most of them failed to foresee that even they, the keepers of the almighty computer, were also subject to the same forces.
Where will it all end? Will capitalism and technology continue to create jobs and opportunities for wealth-building even as they destroy others?
The historical record says yes, they always have. Automobiles beat out horse buggies, but buggy makers could convert to making cars. The proverbial buggy whip manufacturer could have switched to making hood ornaments etc. The total number of people employed directly or indirectly through the automotive industry is vast.
It continues to change. Computers inside car engines have displaced some neighborhood mechanics, but now they sell snack foods and lottery tickets at the counter instead of getting their hands dirty.
I believe that computers have obviously become such an integral part of our economy that there will continue to be opportunities, although they may not all be obvious.
A lot of computer-related hustling is going on. At my local Dominoe's, one delivery driver made extra cash by assembling his own PCs and selling them on eBay. He claims to have a friend making $600K at Microsoft and says he could work there too if he knew more English, and he may be telling the truth. He studies for his A+ from a Russian language textbook. He is most interested in digital photography, however, and plans to move to Florida soon to start a business in that.
A former manager is beginning a political commentary "talk radio" show -- on CD-ROMs, which he plans to issue on a monthly subscription basis, but is also checking out the possibilities of using online software to start his own online radio talk show station. He's also working on various computer-related publishing ventures such as a medical textbook written by a local university professor.
The current manager used to own a web hosting business in his basement but claims there's no money in it anymore.
Yet a now-former assistant manager bought himself a server for $2000, pays $200 a month as rent to some company who owns the lines connecting it to the Internet, but collects far more than that in web hosting fees. He won't reveal the details of what he makes, nor what he makes by selling PCs he buys for wholesale at flea markets. Nor what he made by selling his grandmother's antique dolls on eBay -- he claimed to be working there only to establish a good credit record so he could advance his business and wasn't too devasted when fired, so maybe he made most of what he claimed.
Another driver uses the Internet to sell affiliate products.
That's just one Dominoes. Granted, some there use the Internet only for porn and dating and others couldn't even turn on a computer to save their lives.
Need more clues?
While I was waiting for my car to my fixed at a local dealer's, I learned that one of the counter clerks makes car related stickers and decals which he sells on eBay to fans/owners of those fancy car models. A used car wholesaler who also happened to be hanging around buys a bag of parts at wholesale from a model car manufacturer, spends several days assembling the parts, then sells the model cars on eBay.
In 2002 I revised my book and the sales letter on my site to emphasize self-employment using techie skills over seeking a conventional techie job. How many millions of people around the world are proving that this is an intelligent (though not popular) stance?
Yes, techies have been laid off by the tens of thousands or more. Yet how many tens of thousands of people are making a substantial part time or full time income from eBay, from repairing computers in their spare time, from designing their own games, writing their own shareware, writing ebooks full of useful advice that would be too expensive to self-publish in paper?
So, although the prospects for traditional, 9 to 5, lifetime guaranteed employment, computer *careers* have diminished since 1999 -- the opportunities to make decent part time money -- or far more, in the case of many highly successful online marketers, super-affiliates and eBay power sellers -- is far greater than it ever has been.
This applies to techies skills as well. Smart techies are using the Internet to sell their skills and services directly to customers -- from Java applets, consumer software, books on how to clean up Windows Registry, integrating databases on websites etc.
The only limits are in the mind. Unfortunately, the mindset of many techies is that it's disgraceful to actually lower themselves to tailoring their output to the true needs and desires of the customers, or to advertise their skills or bring to market a product that's good enough and on time, instead of one that's perfect but too late.
Too many techies think they get paid for their knowledge and skills rather than for the *application* of those skills. Too many don't understand their place within a business or -- especially -- learn that to make more money and be less vulnerable to cyclic layoffs, they have to learn how to expand their place within a business, to accept more responsibility.
If you're like my niece and getting a computer science degree, I strongly urge you to take all the marketing, finance, management science, project management, economics and other business related courses you can possibly fit into your schedule.
Good techies are very smart people -- which can often mean they have trouble communicating -- even lowering themselves to try to communicate with us non-techies. Needless to say, this is poor customer service.
So really, the answer to the question is, it depends on your desire.
If you really want a computer career, then go for it.
They're not going away. I mean, does anybody think that today's babies will find all the computer careers gone?
Don't we realize they'll have opportunities to have a computer career in a job or technology that doesn't even exist today?
So, if you really want to work with computers, then start studying.
If you just hate your current job or you're unemployed and just want any decent job or you just want more money so you're attracted by the current highly publized shortages, then be careful.
Once you have a certification, I can't promise you a job. Even in 1999 I wrote that you also wanted to get experience -- preferably paid but volunteer service to a charity was better than nothing -- but only a few people paid attention to me :)
If you're over 25, you'll find many doors closed to you, but if you're determined and smart and flexible you'll find a door open or you'll kick it down!
Rick Stooker, author
Secrets of Changing to a Computer Career, a computer careers book
