Does certification really matter?

Some days it seems you will never get out of school. No matter how much you invest pre-career in training and education it is never enough.

However, luckily for channel sales and technical staff, it is mostly the boss who ends up having to fork out the thousands - year after year - in response to a never-ending rollout of products and technologies.

Even more luckily, most channel bosses seem happy enough to do that. Although it is difficult to quantify some of the benefits, the consensus in the Australian market seems to be that resources spent on training and certification are rarely, if ever, wasted.

'I think it's critical,' says Steve Nola, managing director of South African system integrator Dimension Data in Australia. 'If you want to be in this business you have got to be able to prove to a customer that your staff know what they're doing.'

Craig Neil, managing director at contact centre specialist integrator North Shore Connections (NSC), agrees. 'It is important for us. It's something, I think, that differentiates one business from another business,' Neil says.

We're all sick to the back teeth - admit it - of hearing commentators harp on how 'competitive' today's channel has become.

But it is nevertheless true that training and certification is just one more factor that has become increasingly indispensable as a result of that competitiveness.

'It's important and I think it will continue to be important. Over the last couple of years there haven't been a lot of new technologies being released so new levels of certification haven't come in. But now, with the Microsoft Windows 2003 platform coming out, we see an increase in certifications being released,' Nola says.

Certification - and the training that often leads up to it - plays two interdependent roles. It helps customers sift the myriad service providers hawking their wares and it helps service providers comprehend the myriad technologies hawked by vendors.

Most agree that certification can prove particularly important for integrators in specialised fields that cannot compete on the basis of vendor product range alone. 'When you're an integrator, particularly the certified people and the level at which they are certified, is important. And I think it's more important than the actual volumes of business,' says Neil.

He points out that an integrator can do many projects - but it is how those implementations perform that is important to the customer. Doing lots of big deals but leaving a trail of dissatisfaction in one's wake does not bode well for any business' long-term survival.

Having staff with desirable types and levels of certification certainly assists when pitching for new business. As Neil points out, more jobs are going out to tender these days. 'Because with technology covering different vendors, there's a lot of risk, and so contracts normally relate back to the tender,' he adds.

Bruce McCurdy, CEO at Brisbane-based service provider Clariti, sees certification as less of a differentiator than an evaluator. According to McCurdy, many companies have the same or similar certifications, but if you have them, they do provide a relatively objective yardstick for evaluating staff skills and company capability. 'We believe very firmly in certifications but we believe more in certifications combined with experience. A lot of certifications are paper-based,' he says.

The bit of paper, while valuable, means little without the real-world experience to back it up. Yet a significant level of investment is required to certify staff in existing and emerging technologies.

DiData's Nola says the integrator's staff have in total 20 to 25 different certifications. 'Our training budget runs into the millions, probably close to 1 percent [of revenue],' he says.

The company is in the enviable position of having its own training organisation, Dimension Data Learning Solutions, which Nola claims is 'the top player' in Australian certifications for Cisco, Novell, Microsoft and Lotus Notes. The integrator thus saves considerably on its own training bill. 'We can therefore afford to put a lot of staff through the programs,' Nola says.

Hardware, operating systems and application certification can all be useful if it helps to build the best package for the customer, he says, so it is hard to single out any one vendor certification as more important than another.

That said, so many different certifications exist - going in and out of fashion as technologies enter and leave their respective hype cycles - it is almost impossible for smaller companies to keep up. Nola says smaller resellers need to be niche rather than broad in their approach to the market. 'The best advice I can offer is - figure out where you want to play in the infrastructure space,' Nola says.

Neil warns that in the past some resellers have spread themselves too thin, trying to be all things to all comers. 'I've seen people roll up with reels and reels of certifications and they become three miles wide and only half an inch deep,' Neil says. 'That's one of our challenges - not to do that.'

He believes channel players should instead carefully assess which certifications will add the most value for their current market and customer base. 'It's very easy to sell a lot of products but not that easy to support it, and it's very expensive,' says Neil.

McCurdy says Clariti spends some $15,000 to $25,000 a year on exams alone for its 10 engineers, many of whom study on their own time. Some do as many as five hours a week. 'We're probably spending $500 to $5,000 per course, and of course, you may have to buy study materials for them,' he says.

Training and certification courses are undoubtedly expensive, but McCurdy, for one, believes it is 'most definitely' worth the effort. 'Not the certification itself but the fact that they've gone and learnt. They can perform better. It makes them more knowledgeable. It's a win for themselves and for the client,' he says.

Measuring any return on investment directly stemming from certification, on the other hand, can be problematic, he admits. 'We do get a return. In fact we encourage them [to lift their certification]. Our engineer pay scale is based on certification,' he says.

Each time an engineer gets another relevant certification, she or he gets a raise - the amount of which is tied to the perceived value or desirability of the certification within Clariti, McCurdy says.

Nola says DiData definitely sees benefits from staff certification, especially in the 'hot' areas of security and software, but points out they aren't necessarily from specialist security vendors. 'A lot of vendors, including Cisco, have security elements enabled into them now,' Nola says.
McCurdy says the certification field is developing, with more specialised designations starting to proliferate.

'For example, Microsoft has always had the MCSE but there's now a raft of additional exams beyond that. It doesn't necessarily give them another acronym but does add skills,' he says.

Security certifications are certainly proving popular, with vendors such as Microsoft, Citrix and Cisco carrying the most weight in certification terms, he says. 'But the value is really in whether it offers what the client wants. It's fine to have the highest level of Cisco but if you're talking about a Citrix deployment, it's hard to say what opportunities have more value,' McCurdy says.