I signed up for college to learn Cyber Security. I am learning that all i need are the certs. T/F?

[nkeaton]

@DadWrksAtHome   Unless you are going to one of what I call the certification factories, that is absolutely not true.  DoD started the mess of certifications being valued over experience of education.  Then private industry followed.  DoD has changed back to valuing experience and education over certifications which believe is a much better evaluation of the potential employee. Hopefully private industry will follow again.  

[ericgeater]

I looked into WGU, and likewise noticed that half of their curriculum was someone else's certifications -- and, $20,000, of course.  So I stopped looking into WGU and started adding certs.

I can't say what any other online .EDU would offer, of course... but at this point I don't expect other institutions to be much different in their composition.

[nkeaton]

@ericgeater What people ignore on a program like WGU’s is that there are 3 categories of learning: education, training, and awareness. College is supposed to be education, but these programs are only training. They are teaching them to pass certifications which is nowhere close to education. NIST is very specific about this, and ISC2 follows NIST.

[emb021]

Several of us have discussed this before.

Certifications have their place, but they are NO replacement for a proper education.  Even the SANS Education Institute, which uses the certifications from SANS/GIAC (more properly, they are using the SANS courses, and earning the cert is basically passing the class) STILL has you do additional work to earn their degrees.

Its unfortunately that too many companies get lazy and demand certs OVER experience as an easy way to weed out applications.  This is not new and many of us have had to deal with it.

Even then, if you pursue ANY certification, you should focus on LEARNING the material and understanding it, not just in passing a test.  And certifications should ONLY be pursued if they are relevant for the type of work you want to do, not in getting certs because you think they are some kind of "golden ticket" to a job.