CERTIFICATIONS/SELF STUDY

"True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing" - Socrates

Certifications provide the professional with credentialed verification and authenticity of their knowledge and experience.  The benefits of having certification are often correlated with being ranked higher up in the preverbal resume stack as well as promotion and/or higher starting salary.   I have worked in the IT industry for over 22 years in just about every sector including: public, private, education, and non-profit, I must say I have never been a fan of certifications. After interviewing hundreds of job candidates for advanced IT positions over the years, I found that despite a good looking resume and certification, many candidates can’t answer interview questions pertaining to even the most basic fundamental knowledge of the areas covered on certification objectives and exams.  The truth of the matter is people cheat on certification exams.  I offer a warning to anyone who is planning to cheat or has cheated on a certification exam, it will be very hard  to get hired and eventually you will be discovered as a fraud unless you right the wrong.  Do not cheat yourself out of a career by cheating on certification exams, you are only hurting yourself.   Personally, I have never hired a fraud, mainly because I have the experience and knowledge to filter out the fraudulent job candidates from the qualified ones.   Certifications can complement job experience.  Having a resume consisting of an appropriate balance of both certs and real experience is what I look for when selecting job candidates to hire.   If you have less than 5 years of on the job experience, then you should not be overly certified with professional level certs.  That will certainly raise a red flag to many hiring managers and the expectations of job interview performance will be raised.   
Now that that’s out of the way, this collection of certification pages is designed to assist those on a wireless certification journey.  I myself stopped taking certification exams after becoming complacent after years of working in public sector as a “Jack of all trades” IT admin.  In 2014 however I started working for Cisco with a focus on wireless and quickly realized that it was time to start up again.  There are many blogs on the internet that include study notes, technical deep dives and labs, I don’t want to waste time copying/pasting things that you could just read in a book yourself, so rather….. these pages will focus on the resources I used to pass the test as well as some helpful tips.