I recently attended the Microsoft “new day” seminar in Olympia, WA. along with a few of my co-workers, each of us attending one of the three “Tracks” offered. As the resident server architect of the group, I stuck mostly with “Track 2” which focused primarily on SharePoint and InfoPath technologies.The last presentation I hung around for was concerned with the new Microsoft certification paths, esp. Vista, SharePoint 2007, and Exchange 2007. During Q&A, one attendee asked the presenter for suggestions on how to persuade management to offer more than just one class per year to a handful of employees, considering the proliferation of technology, that as IT Professionals we are expected to, following the cliché, “do more with less.”

Sharing her frustrations, I met with the presenter after most of the attendees were filtering from the room. One thing that struck me was that when I received my MCSE back in 1996, Microsoft’s product portfolio was relatively scant compared today. The presenter was able to go further into detail – according to him, in 1994 Microsoft had roughly 400 SKUs; today there are over 2000!

That ol’ cliché needs to be updated – we’re doing more with more! As was evident at this seminar, there are more computers surrounding us than ever before, from the laptop at my desk, to the myriad of systems in the server room(s), to the Treo slung on my hip. There are more technology products, and they are more complex, than ever before, and those of us in the IT industry are being pushed to integrate them for our customers, clients and users, in more intricate ways than was imagined 10+ years ago.

Visiting the vendor’s booth for yet another “SWAG” grab on my way out the door, the person manning the booth asked for my opinion on the certification presentation and whether I thought certification, in general, was still meaningful. After giving her a diplomatically elusive non-answer, I was still pondering that question all the way home.

In 1996, the MCSE was the veritable “Gold Standard” of IT Certifications. I went on to pad the acronyms at the end of my email signature with the other “prestigious” certifications.

Shortly after the dot-com implosion, I found my self back in a “help-desk” position and a long upward career climb to re-invent myself. I watched as co-workers with nothing better to do, sit back at their desk cramming through certification training kits, passing the exams with flying colours, and proudly touting their newly verified “expertise.” Yet, in their day-to-day administrative duties could barely troubleshoot a bad driver install or faulty DHCP configuration!

Drifting back from my reverie of yesteryear, my thoughts returned to that woman’s question of how to get more training out of management’s tight grip on the purse strings. In my current position at my present employer, our answer to that predicament has been to create our own training, and deliver it to our peers. Through shared experience and delegated specialties, my group has divided our responsibilities into specialties, such as Networking, Infrastructure, Desktop, etc. and each of us can concentrate on what we know and learn from the others for the expertise we lack, specifically to focus on our employers environment.

To quote another cliché, “a jack of all trades, and master of none” seems appropriate. Adam Smith made it clear, specialization is the key. Technologies are proliferating at an alarming rate, and vendors are introduction more products all the time, with a dizzying number of features and options available. A DBA may not be able to know SQL, BI, OLAP, C#, XML, and an innumerable count of other “alphabet soup” of technologies without being forced to give up expertise in another area, and therefore must rely on other specialists to integrate with their knowledge.

Certifications are still necessary and valuable. Yet it falls upon the experts’ supervisors and management better understand the competencies required in their organizations and ensure that they have the experts on their teams to cover the requirements for their projects and operations. IT Professionals, working with a guiding push by the “invisible hand,” should follow their own IT self interest and concentrate on those technologies and certifications that will allow them the specialization to be successful.