
An essay on Siebel certification by Alexander Hansal, Senior Principal Instructor at Oracle University
As an Oracle Siebel CRM instructor, I deal directly with certification on a regular basis. Companies like mine offer various kinds of credentials for users of their products. They also offer (and often require) certain training classes be completed before a candidate can sit for a certification exam. Over the last 13 years I have personally delivered many of these classes to students who later took exams. Frequently I am also asked to teach preparation workshops for companies that want to certify a group of their staff at the same time.
If I ask my students the value of IT certification I can get any response from “worthless piece of paper” to “the ultimate career booster”. When I ask them about the reason they are pursing certification most of them tell me:
“My employer wants me to be credentialed, so they can put me on this project”
This may be because most of my students work for either systems integrators or the IT departments of large corporations but they are representative.
In general, certification seems to split the IT community into camps of people who either loathe or love certification. Typing “does certification matter?” into your favorite search engine will yield plenty of blog posts, articles and documents on the topic. The essence of these in a nutshell is IT certifications are often used as filter criteria by HR especially for junior level staff but they are not always an accurate measure the real-life experience of the worker. The comments sections of these pages are full with stories related to a certified worker who didn’t have a clue how to accomplish the even the simplest of job tasks.
So the undeniable value of certification for most people is that it helps them secure a job in the first place. When a corporation invests thousands or millions of dollars or Euros in a system, the minimum requirement that those tasked with delivery can actually accomplish the job for seems to be the certificates they hold and this is especially true for third party consultants.
So, yes, to many of us, certification does matter.
How Decision Makers Regard IT Certifications
The split regarding the value of certification also shows in the following diagram which is based on a survey conducted by CompTIA in of 800 IT managers in the United States.

Image Source: CompTIA
The questions regarding “baseline set of knowledge”, “credibility”, “save me time and resources in evaluating” and “higher starting salaries” were agreed with by more than 50% of the managers and none of the statements was strongly disagreed more with than from 22% of the managers. This illustrates that most decision makers put value in certification but many of them do it only half-heartedly.
The next diagram from the same survey shows the factors used when evaluating IT job candidates.

Image Source: CompTIA
For 86% of the respondents, IT certifications are a factor for evaluating job candidates and for 52% of the respondents it is an essential factor. Yet experience far outweighed credentials when it comes to evaluating candidates. Factors which count even more than IT certification, include “quality of experience”, “record of steady growth”, “total years of experience” and “technical skills”.
Commitment
So while certification is no substitute for experience, I believe that when you pursue a career in IT, especially as in highly specialized area like Siebel CRM, you have to show commitment to your skills. Obtaining the certification is a reliable proof that you have made a commitment to become a true expert. But passing the exam in-and-of-itself does not make you an expert. Neither does memorizing questions much less skimming answers from a “brain dump”. It just shows a lack of commitment that will be revealed when you are face the first true challenges in the project.
Summing it up I would say that for those with decades of experience in the field, IT certifications may be something they hang on the wall and when they apply for new jobs, their experience will get them the position. Becoming an employee of a consultancy or systems integrator might make certification a necessity. But for the most junior employees certification combined with dedication and hard work will be the key to a successful career and a fulfilled work life
Further Reading:
Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror: Do Certifications Matter?
Larry Dignan on the ZDNet blog: IT certifications matter, but validating them can be tricky
Derrick Wlodarz on Technibble.com: 5 Reasons why IT certifications still matter
Oracle University Certification Home Page