LakTEK A Sri Lankan, A Rubyist and A Web Dude

Posted
16 January 2009 @ 5am

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Professional Education is Bullshit!

Most of my university colleagues has this craze of following various professional education courses and certifications. They call it CIMA, BIT, BCS, ACS, SCJP, CCNA, MSDN, PMP and the list goes on. I don’t get the rationale behind this, What’s the benefit of having all these qualifications? What exactly you gain by spending such hefty amounts of money for these courses? Is it because you think you could decorate your CVs with all these bullshit? Or is it just for the sheer pleasure of seeing random Latin characters printed after your name?

As I know most of these courses focus on single line of technology or certain set of standards, which has no guarantee to be relevant in another 2 years time. Also, comparing with the academic education these courses doesn’t offer much diversity and depth either. You could easily get through these exams by parroting the mock question bank and puke it all at the exam. There is very little chance of anything retaining and absorbing to yourself.

The reality is those qualifications or the grades itself won’t make you brilliant. Those will just take you far away from the reality. It will give you and world that you are a qualified professional. But in reality, most of these people struggles to get things done and fails miserably at the real targets. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergy Brin and Larry Page they all have one thing common. All of them had to dropout from their academic careers, to reach their destiny. That doesn’t mean you need to dropout to make a difference. However, what is evident is that the stuff you do, the challenges you meet, the problems you solve and the experiences you gain during your academic career, are what makes you different from the rest of the stack.

Inspire yourself to gain some real life opportunities. Oragnize a Gig, Do a research (I mean a real one- not those tomfoolery), Start contributing to an open source project or create your own startup. Find something which matches your passions and engage with it. Don’t just waste your precious time and money, by blindly running after professional qualifications that won’t worth a shite.


  • Moderator
    Hi, Im having a BSc Engineering degree (Univeristy of Ruhuna) , I agree a little bit with lakshan, but sometimes having those qualifications will be advantages .. the best example is "My Self" ... i havent been aware of some basic concepts until i study for SCJP, at that time i already had nearly 1 year software development experiance.. :P ya i agrere there can be hundreds of ppl with SC** or MC** who cannot code a single line .. but, the person with the right attitude will always take the benefit of those..what i can say is, those certifications n qualifications do matter, advantages, only if u utilise those in the proper way
  • Totally agree. I got my M$ certification by memorizing the past paper questions. Didn't know to code a line until I started working. The good thing is that more and more employers are slowly coming to this realization.

    In SL context though it really doesn't matter what degree you hold, it's all about which school you went to.
  • Mr.e
    Oh, my goodness, you have hit it on the head! I am tired of people filling their walls with meaningless titles. I find it remarkable that those that really have done the hard work and discipline seldom "brag" about the title. THe fact is any credential means you are at a starting place in your learning, not an end. The more years spent in disciplined study, the more you discover what you really do not know. Those that know really scare me!
  • Amen! haha, prhpz it might not harm to do a taster on something you'd really like, like i waz lukin to do something that'd sharpen my java, but wht i really made a living on wz not anything i evn studied @ university. it's all about doing something you can have fun on. and yeah, thtz wht finally boils dwn to wht you cn do upstairs!
  • This is something I absolutely agree with, as I was in the same batch with Lakshan and I am a dropout too, I really agree. Most of the people who owns these qualifications are blind I guess. As they are really really far way from the reality. I have met a lot of guys in my life who are holds good positions but they are really empty. But still nobody wants to believe this truth, that is the chaos.
  • Well you couldn't have put it better. I agree to each and every word of it. It's a bitter truth which nobody wants to acknowledge! I for one have a fancy Engineering degree in electronics but found my calling ultimately in Software programming. I guess i could have utilized my time much profitably by persuing something which comes to me naturally rather than wasting 4 years to get a B Tech in Engg tag...
  • Professional qualifications most definitely are over rated here none more than CIMA. Of that list you have only PMP is of any value at all. As for dev certs. I have met people with MS* SC* etc who cannot code anything even if their lives depended on it.
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