I think few people get hired on a certification, without a degree, or relevant accompanying experience and references. If a cert is all you've got, you've got very little, these days. There are stories in every organization of any size about the "paper MSCE" who couldn't troubleshoot or repair a failed hard drive in a workstation, for people to regard paid-for-by-the-candidate certs as very credible.

On the other hand, you see these requirements in lots of job postings, becasue they can be a checkmark item for HR departments of basic education or supposed proficiency. A lot of IT managers are only going to see candidates already vetted by HR, so they put these "qualifications" in their job specs, hoping that they'll act as a filter for the HR department.

The problem is that companies like Microsoft, Novell, and Cisco, in trying to provide an approved system of training and certification for technical personnel, have largely failed to be teachers of theory. The economics of the cert industry are far too heavily biased in favor of canned instruction tuned to passing certification tests, for the certs to mean much, at the end.

I've always treated certifications as useless, except for CISSP. I've hired quite a few people (mostly sysadmins/Ops people) in my career, and I've never once considered anyone's certifications*.

But the truth is, if you've got the aptitude to get the CISSP, you've almost certainly got enough real world experience to do the job I'd be hiring for, and I still won't care whether you've got it. It's experience that counts, not training, not pieces of paper that say you paid some money and took a test.

The only people I've ever seen that give certifications any weight are people who don't have a clue what to look for when hiring technical people. Rarely are these good jobs.

* Actually, this isn't purely true. Back in the early 1990s, if you listed a Novell CNA on your resume, I threw it out immediately.

The best certification a prospective IT pro can present today is acing two semesters of introductory accounting, especially since current state-of-the-art hardware and middleware is designed to replace 'certified' techs.

Microsoft: Moderate
Sun: Zilch.
Cisco: Moderate-to-High
CISSP/security: High
CompTIA: Zilch*
*bonus points if you can use static electricity to kill the testing center's PC

I agree with what Toxic says, but I would add that the Certs are to get you past the clueless gatekeepers who are screening access to the folks who actually know what is what. It's a doorkey, that's all.

Mischief's point about intro accounting is spot-on. Be able to "talk business" and you are miles ahead of the pack. Plus you can use things like Net Present Value to justify the costs of a nifty new cabinet of servers.

The BF is a network engineer - without any college, he only has certifications. I am looking to get into the industry and am studying for my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) certification. He and all of the other networking people I know (through him) say it's the most basic certification I'd need to do what they do.

I can't speak about the others but I can say that MCSEs are mostly worthless (but then I'm saying this as a server engineer who works mostly with MS software and doesn't have an MCSE)

In my 14+ years in this job I have never met an MCSE who was any good. In one notable case I knew a guy who passed his MCSE with distinction (no mean feat) and yet couldn't do the most basic tasks. Pitiful.

So my view on MCSEs is this: An MCSE won't make a good engineer bad, but neither will it make a bad engineer good.

Having interviewed a kazillion people for technical positions in the past seven years I can say with a good deal of authority that the more certifications someone has the less likely I am to recommend that we hire them. MCSEs are the worst (if we exclude the totally meaningless A+ crap and "degrees" from diploma mills), CCIEs are often a sign that someone actually knows what they're doing, but it seems like a ton of experience gets them there all the same. A CISSP would be useful, but like others have stated above that's mostly covered by experience.