Online Courses/Certifications questions

Question

I have some free time now - waiting to apply to college next year for a Master's degree - and I've been looking at online courses / certification programs like W3CSchools and O'Reilly and there are a few questions that come to mind:

• Are Certificates or Online Courses relevant, say for an IT company? Knowledge is good but I pay my bills. I need to know if it's a good investment.
• Can you suggest other courses/certifications in the following categories?
  • Ruby / Rails, jQuery, Scala
  • Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing
  • Hadoop, HBase, MongoDB

Answer 1

Don't trust w3schools to much ( http://w3fools.com/ ),and I personally think that you don't necessary need a certification just to prove your skills, there are many ways for programmers to show up their skills, using github, your portfolio, your blog, linkedin etc. And for courses we have plenty of them, tutorials,books and Internet.

good luck :)

Answer 2

About W3Schools you should first read this: http://w3fools.com/

http://teamtreehouse.com/ is by far the best badges/training I have seen, I am still waiting for leaks of content since I cannot pay for such a course.

If you want perks to land a job, design yourself a nice portfolio.

Answer 3

I can recommend these two websites for Scala courses:

• http://www.scala-lang.org/node/1305
• http://scala-labs.github.com/

Answer 4

It depends very much upon what kind of organisation you want to work for.

There are certainly some organisations - typically larger corporates, especially those that don't specialise in software - which value this kind of thing. If that's where you want to work, go for it.

If you want to work at a small high-tech company or startup, however, it's likely to be of very little use. In fact, it may hurt you. I've worked at startups my entire career and have spent much of my time hiring. Although I certainly wouldn't reject someone because they have some kind of certification on their CV, it is definitely a "red flag" which makes me think that the candidate is likely to be an "also ran" and not the kind of high-flyer I'm looking for.

I'm far more likely to be impressed by seeing examples of what you've done. Websites you've developed for friends, charities or by working freelance. Or open source projects you've contributed to. Or anything that demonstrates that you've actually done something.