Which Linux Certification? 93
dirvish asks: "I am trying to break into the Linux Server Administration field so I have been doing quite a bit of studying lately. I figured while I am studying the subject I might as well work towards a related certification. I am leaning towards the Linux Professional Institute Certification. Other certifications I am considering are CompTIAs Linux+ and Red Hats RHCE. So which Linux certification is the best? I would say Red Hat is the most reputable of these three but I am concerned that their certification might be too Red-Hat-centric, and I don't want to be locked into one distro. Which one is the easiest/cheapest to obtain? Which is the mostly highly regarded in the industry? Are there others that I missed?"
I would go with a vendor (Score:2, Informative)
RHCE...Does IBM or Novell offer anything yet?
It's always best to certify for the job you have, or want to get.
UserActive (Score:3, Informative)
for what? (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to get a job with IBM/Novell then an LPIC will do just fine. These are the only companies I have ever seen an LPIC listed as preferred or required for.
If you want to know which is a harder and more relevant cert it is the LPIC hands down. The LPIC actually certifies you know vendor neutral linux and how to do things the hard way. The RHCE can be passed without every touching linux, it is similar to the MCSE.
LPIC (Score:4, Informative)
I actually have the LPIC-1 certification. The test itself was surprisingly hard for an entry level linux certification, but fair. I read somewhere that the failure rate is near 60%, so don't expect to just walk in and ace it.
I wouldn't bother with the Linux+ exam. While it might bamboozle some HR departments, I wonder if it's hard enough to demonstrate any real competence with linux. The only CompTIA certification I have is the A+ (paid for by a former employer) and it was a *total* joke. A monkey could pass it.
Any of them or none of them. (Score:5, Informative)
It works like this, I'm looking for a linux system admin, and I have a stack of way more people than I want to even call back.
A is fresh out of school with no particular qualifications, but he claims to know Linux. He goes in the "no" pile.
B has ten years of Windows and Novell sys admin experience, but no professional Linux experience, although he claims to know SUSE. OK, he goes in the "maybe" pile.
C has ten years of Unix system administration experience, including NIS, LDAP, and five years of professional experience with several Linux distros. He goes in the "call back" pile.
D is fresh out of school with no with a certification in Linux administration. He goes in the "no" pile, after the briefest moment of delay.
E has ten years of Windows and Novell sys admin experience, no professional Linux experience, but he has a certification from Red Hat. OK, so he goes in the "call back" pile.
.200. A certification might raise a .200 to a .210 or a .215. Which is enough to be worth considering.
.800 or .900. Doesn't mean you'll get to home, but you'll almost certainly get to first base.
You see how this works? The certification doesn't make up for your lack of professional experience. If I want an experienced system administrator, I'm going to hire one. I'm going to prefer ones with knowledge of the platform, the best way is if its on their resume, but I'm more open to a guy who has the real world admin skills that could be transferred than I am to somebody whose certification only establishes a theoretical knowledge of Linux administration.
In the end it doesn't matter much which one you get. None of these certifications are like getting a CPA, which carries weight because it implies a number of years of hands on experience plus a strong theoretical grounding in accounting. My advice would be to get the certification that you think has the greatest "brand name" recognition.
Think of it like batting in baseball. The goal is to get to home, but even a tremendously talented hitter only gets to first base on his own skills less than one third of the time. Getting the job is coming to home; getting the interview is first base. At this stage, you're very lucky if you bat
But also work your network. You don't have one? Well, maybe. Don't you have friends working in the field? Suppose you have a friend working as an app developer. If he happens to drop your name to a supervisor looking for a sys admin, and follows up by hand delivering your resume, your batting average is going to go way up -- more like
Also consider non-standard ways of finding that job. So, that fortune 100 company that has the full page ad for linux admins in the Sunday paper? Unless you have a resume that's going to stand out, forget it. But that small non-profit that needs a "computer guy" that has a card up in the job placement at the university? Go for it. That's how I got started.
RHCE... (Score:3, Informative)
I've got an RHCE from Red Hat 7.3 which is now "non-current". I do plan to re-certify under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 even though my present company doesn't use Red Hat (erm, sorry, PNAEL), but its CentOS clone. I find most of the information garnered from the courses and/or exam can still apply to other distros with some modification, though some topics are still somewhat Red Hat technology centric (Kickstart/Anaconda, various GUI tools).
Overall, I think if you can pass the RHCE, you've indirectly demonstrated a general working knowledge of Linux administration as well. Some of the topics I've learned in the RHCE process have helped me settle into other distros as well (i.e. Gentoo, SuSE)
If you're ambitious, and have lots of money to spend, by all means go for the LPI and other certs as well.
Re:"Which one is best?" (Score:5, Informative)
In the IT field there aren't many certifications if any that are equivalent to the PE but that's just a matter of time. Consider security-related certs like the CISSP and GIAC that demonstrate knowledge and in the case of the CISSP that the holder has documented past experience (4 years) working in security-related IT jobs. Someday IT certifications will carry as much weight as any of the current professional certifications and will allow the holder to sign and attest to the validity of the design or security or implementation of some aspect of IT
To the original questioner, reading down below it sounds like the LPIC is the harder. Frankly, I'd be inclined to get the LPIC and try and add to it a security certification like the CISSP or GIAC. If you don't have the applicable 4-year-time experience for the CISSP then you'll have to get the GIAC. Both are hard and well respected in their areas. The CISSP is a bit more director/consultant/CSO oriented while the GIAC is more engineering oriented so it may be more useful to you for now. Either way, get a security cert as well. Just knowing how to administer makes you a candidate. Knowing secure administration makes you a stand-out candidate.
Step One Importantance (Score:3, Informative)
Here at my company, I get resumes and check them out and say, this person, yes, that person, no, and the others in my group do the same, and whoever someone REALLY wants to meet, or who most in the group kinda want to bring in get brought in.
We're smart, know the field, know what certs show and don't, etc.
But we're not stage one. We're stage TWO. Where did those resumes come from in the first place? Who went out on Monster and other places and pulled resumes to show us? Who screened the resumes he/she got sent due to a posting?
Screening/First Selection is stage one. Certs are searchable as key terms. They get you placed above another person with equivilent qualifications in the mind of HR.
That's where you want them. If you have experience, and have a lot of buzzwords on your resume which can be searched for, you don't need certs for stage one. But they won't hurt.
And that gets you to stage two. Now, you might not make it past stage two. But your chance of making it past stage two are ZERO if you don't get grabbed in stage one.
Hence certs.
That said, I believe that certs can HURT you in stage two. Some of us think some certs are crap, and will actually diminsh you in our estimation. So for THAT reason, get good certs, if you go that route.
Read _Sweaty Palms_ by H. Anthony Medley. It's a great book on interviewing and the job application process.
Remember.. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Any of them or none of them. (Score:3, Informative)
I started by becoming a very low level SA for my university the year after I graduated. That gave me a year of experience, enough to get me a better job for another few years, and that gave me enough experience to get a junior SA role at my current company, where now I'm #2 SA worldwide. So it can be done.
Re:Any of them or none of them. (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, it sucks, but imagine how much more it will suck on the other end of your career, when you're too senior for most of the jobs that are out there. The point is that job searching is about rejection. You get rejected and rejected and rejected and rejected. Unlike you're mom and girlfiend, they don't know how wonderful you are, which is why getting a friend to put in a good word is so valuable.
I may have painted too bleak a picture. I've hired guys right out of school -- when I'm looking for somebody cheap to fil a junior position. What I'm saying is don't expect anybody to be impressed with your "certification".
I've installed gentoo on a few boxes, repaired mandrake, used redhat 9 and SuSE, but nothing professionally. Are you saying I should start by joining in a non-profit organization and work my way up?
Not necessarily. Work your way up, yes; be aware of different avenues for finding jobs, yes. But don't expect me to count any of that mucking around as system administration experience. I think it speaks well of yoru curiosity, but it's not experience. You might get a job in a large data center, but it definitely won't be running it. Don't be to offended if you are asked to make coffee. In fact if you're wise you get that phase out of the way by getting an internship. Interns are easy shoe ins for real live jobs.
WRT the non-profit, that's just an example of the fact you can take different strategies. It's not for everyone. Another strategy is get in on the ground floor of a big outfit and climb through a Darwinian process to the top of the heap over everyone else. It's a good strategy, but every strategy has its disadvantages too. You aren't going to have a lot of autonomy to do things the way you like, until you have risen to become master of the universe. Getting to the interview stage is going to be tougher.
But are non-profit orgs professional experience? And how do we make money in the meantime?
Yes: a job is a job. If you had one or two years of professional experience in a small company (a non-profit was just an example), you're well positioned to get into the rat race. Another advantage is that in a smaller company you get more decision making power right from the get go. However I wouldn't stay in that area too long unless you want to track your career that way. For one thing, you'll miss out on having colleagues (your future employment network).
Don't let a job become a career track unless that's what you really want.
In many ways, the sweet spot for hiring a junior person is somebody with a year or two of real world experience. Somebody with an internship in exactly the kind of situation I'm hiring would be ideal, but somebody with 1-2 years of professional experience looking to change industries is definitely ahead of somebody fresh out of school.
I'm really curious as to the answer to those questions, because they're most likely the ones I'll be facing in 3 years.
You've got lots of time, but don't waste it. Go for a summer internship. Be cheerful, useful, and a pleasure to work with. Cultivate people. I you have a summer internship, keep in touch with the people you've cultivated through the year, see if you can't get odd jobs during winter break for example. Once upon a time, there were two classes of people: entrepreneurs, who worried about getting ahead, selling, networking and all that stuff.
Go for the RCHE, then even the RCHA (Score:3, Informative)
First part is 2.5 hours. You have that much time in front of a box to fix 10 problems. 5 of them are mandatory to fix. They cover many things, and when I took this part, I had no need to really ever use RedHat specific tools.
Second part is 3 hours, and is a network install and configuration of RHEL3. Here you need to know about the installer (duh), and package managment, but that pretty much ends the Red Hat specific part once again. If you admin Linux, and sit down for a few hours with RHEL 3 and the checklist [redhat.com]. and you can pass it.
Honestly, it is one of the better certificaiton exams I have taken, due to it being practical. If they throw you a mail server setup situation, you can use your choice of server if it is in RedHat. You have to be aware of security, but they don't demand a specific method. The end result is you pass if you get the job done, it doesn't matter how.
Now, RCHE is a good first step, however as someone said, it isn't specificially a certificate to prove someone can hand full data center control to you. And let me explain:
RCHT: This is their lowest certification. It means "Hi, I can install Linux and configure some things, but not really do much on the network side". The test for this is embedded in the RCHE test now. Basicially if you don't pass the RCHE, you may still walk away with an RCHT
RCHE: This is the median certification. It means "Hi, I can install Linux, and get basic networking services up and secure. I can also integrate the box into the directory if it is simple".
RCHA: This is the highest level one Red Hat takes, and I would advise to get RCHE first. It is "Hi, I can install Linux, configure network services, design the directory services, secure and tune the box, and expand the box when the time comes. I can layout plans for an entire data center."
Or in Red Hat's words:
RHCEs provide the technical leadership for managing Linux servers and network services, as well as escalation of issues from the larger group of RHCTs. A smaller number of RHCAs provide leadership for technical planning, design and integration of an organization's worldwide open source architecture.