[BBLISA] Training recomendations sought.

[Grant Young]

I've been through the Red Hat Cert Course and taken the RHCE test
twice.  The first time after I took the course and then a couple of
years later when I thought it might enhance my marketability.  It
actually didn't help marketability as I'm doing Solaris admin mostly
now.  In my experience nothing beats experience. :-) 

I think the certs are best for being marketable by a consulting firm. 
That is, when you're being rented out as a consultant, being certified
gives the client piece of mind.  That said, I think the Red Hat test was
probably reasonably fair in that having day-to-day experience really
helped and the test was concrete rather than multiple choice.  I've lost
some trust in that it's usually given at the end of the fast track
course and if you haven't taken the course they kind of treat you like
an interloper.

I'd definitely recommend taking any course you can, especially when
you're interested and they're paid for by your employer and you'll have
a chance to apply them on the job.  Yeah, many are vendor-specific
courses but you'll get up to speed much faster that way.  The Veritas
courses I've taken have been helpful that way.

The one day tutorials at Usenix conferences are usually really good,
especially in broader areas like security or open source software
topics.  I've taken a bunch of them and they were really, really
excellent at broadening my skills and knowledge of tools available for
the job.  It's a bit of a firehose treatment but I'd say I got more bang
for the buck out of those courses than any others in terms of career
growth.  In general, I got more out of the Usenix LISA conferences than
any other one week conference or class I've been to.  The variety and
level of topics and people to talk to is unsurpassed.  The next LISA is
in November (www.usenix.org).

On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 08:10, Michael C Tiernan wrote:
> Does anyone have any suggestions for good UNIX SysAdmin/Engineer
> training classes?
> 
> I don't know that I'm interested but my company is looking for a list of
> possible things we may be interested in pursuing and I was thinking that
> getting a certification of some form (Solaris/RedHat/etc.) might be a
> good idea.
> 
> Opinions?
> 
> Thanks for everyone's time.
> 
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-- 
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Grant Young