"Hey your resume is really impressive, my client would love to have your experience on board, but you really need to have this one specific certification you don't mention, do you have XXXX?"
"Hey Chris, I noticed you don't have this particular certification that we sell. I'm sure it would be really valuable for your career"
As of this past April, minus a few digressions and diversions, I've been doing this for 30 years... Literally since high school. I have a masters and 95% of a PhD in this field (everything but the thesis defense, which I'm probably not going to bother with because my program got canceled and I don't feel like starting over somewhere else). I've been TEACHING professional certification classes in this field for more than 20 of those years, and intermittently teaching various topics in this field at the undergrad and graduate level for more than 15 of those 30 years. I have been a keynote speaker at events for other people with similar experience who do the same thing, and my list of talks and publications is in my resume... Or rather a short abbreviated list is, because the full list runs to multiple pages.
I NEVER stop training... I'm training myself both formally and informally, constantly. I've taken dozens of hours of training across a half dozen different vendors or subtopics in my field, in the last year alone. I haven't bothered taking the certification exam for any of them, because I haven't felt like paying the fee to do so.
The last time I actually NEEDED a cert, was well over 15 years ago. Anything I got since was either because I wanted it, or because an employer or client contractual requirement specified I have it... and I REALLY hate that. It's just silly frankly. Again... I literally TEACH these certifications, and probably have been teaching them since before most of you or your clients people have been in IT.
Hell... 95% of my job isn't technical at all... I just need to know the tech side, to even know what conversation to have with who.
Most of what I do, is act as a relationship counselor between multiple groups of people, most of whom are trying to do the right thing, and either can't figure out what that is, or have conflicting ideas about what that is, or just can't see how to get there from where they are.... Most of the rest of what I do, is making sure that my employers and clients can't be successfully sued, or screwed over by auditors or regulators.
The other 5% that actually IS purely technical, is what I was doing part of last week and the week before...
Which was working 6 days a week 20 hours a day, unbuggering a complex firewall and IDS infrastructure, including enterprise management and monitoring thereof, built across 19 international sites, and four different endpoint security platforms, that hadn't been built right in the first place, and hadn't been properly maintained since 2017... All without taking any production impacting outage. I had to get that infrastructure to a stable, current, and supportable state, so that I could ensure if anything went catastrophically wrong I could get vendor supoort; then decommission the existing on premises mangement and monitoring systems; building and deploying new management and monitoring cleanly, into a hybrid public private cloud infrastructure; all in time for the emergency shutdown of the primary management site for that infrastructure. And THAT had to be done in just over a week (instead of the two month I had been planning on taking to do the job) because they hadn't planned on shutting that site down down 'til September, but suddenly had to shut down by the end of June instead, because it was that or pay a year's worth of additional lease and contract penalties.
...And I was the one who had to do it, because I'm the only guy in the entire company who knows any two of the four platforms in question (all four actually but nobody else in the company knows more than one of them) well enough to actually unbugger it (and yes, it was well and thoroughly buggered)... and because having anyone else mucking about with it while I was unbuggering it, would have just buggered it up worse.
I don't HAVE the certs in those four platforms... I TEACH those four platforms... at WELL beyond the level required for any of those vendors certifications. I haven't bothered renewing any of those vendor certs in years, unless I had to to teach the certification class.
So yeah... Its always amusing when a recruiter says "Oh do you have this cert" to me... or even funnier, when someone is trying to sell me on a new cert.
Yeah... Did you ACTUALLY read my resume, or did you just do a keyword search and see I matched more than three of your keywords?
