Adobe Certification: worth it or not ?

[Art H]

Welcome to Adobe Talk with me your host Art. I'm feeling a little
veclemp here. No big whoop. Talk amoungest yourselves I 'll give you a
topic Adobe Certification: worth it or not ? Discuss. ( Thanks to
Mike Meyers and SNL for the opening )

[Carlos S]

I have always wondered that myself. Now from when I was taught, your
portfolio was be all that end all. Then again businesses like that
whole certification thing. I know if I was hiring someone for a high
end position they would get a plus for the cert, but for average jobs
it might even hurt their chances because I might think they are over
qualified and therefore want more money and blow my budget. This might
boil down to the situation you are in, but I want to hear this

[Art H]

Well I must confess that I do have my own reason for asking. I was
thinking of getting the adobe certified instructor cert to help in
landing more teaching gigs. I'm rather leary of it because I also have
a microsoft cert The MCSA and as Carlos said I think it was a warning
light to some places. I should point out to those that don't know
about the Microsoft cert that now there are quite a few certs that
test a small field of knowledge as oppose to back in the day when
there was two. You wanted to be an engineer you took the MCSE and if
you wanted to be an administrator you took the MCSA. I believe that
conventional wisdom is still that you need one of these certs if want
to get into a decent place with a long term job.

As Carlos mentioned, your portfolio should show it all
( knowledge,skill,talent ) but the focus seems to be on how many certs
you have lined up( at least in the IT field) I've met people that
nailed all their test but couldn't do anything except edit their
myspace page or post on Live Journal. So let me add a sub topic to
this.

Who doesn't have an Adobe certification and what do you do?

[Carlos S]

Hey Art

I didn't know that ADobe had a teachers certification. That just made
this conversation about ten times more interesting as I am tryng to
gear myself toward teaching design in a few years to a decade.

If anything I have noticed is this, although us designers and
creatives are basically brothers ( and sisters ) from a different
mother, there can be schisms that divide our fields. The web designers
can't talk about CSS to a print designer, production artists can feel
dwarfed if anyone with a creative director position hangs out with
them. Coders and illustrators, and so on. The same goes for where you
work. Sometimes for a big house you have to have the cert just to show
merit because of inner politics. Other times it can be a turn off. I
remember the first place I worked at as a designer. The boss asked me
in the interview why am I wearing a tie. The one beautiful thing about
our field is that we can build away from the norm, and have all this
lovely "21st century thinking" that I always refer to.

If you were at Flashcamp last weekend, I do hope you were in the class
discussing the future of design education. The two people running the
class really did have some great points that they shared. I know a lot
of the people in there were teachers, while I was the one who had only
taught in the past. They really did open my eyes into seeing what will
be important for teachers in the future.

So in conclusion I would say this: Is it important? To me the cert
kinda seems like icing on the cake, but if you don't have the cake
itself, no one wants to eat a whole serving of icing. I know I can't.
You have to see if the peers in your area have this cert. And of
course it doesn't hurt to ask. Once you get this cert, then go non
stop teaching.

[Art H]

Hi Carlos,

Thanks for the comments.

For you and anyone else interested in Adobe Certification.
http://www.adobe.com/support/certification/