Does the Red Hat cert not come with a CPE option?

Not that it would help, I have a Cysa+ that I need to earn CPE for, but there haven't been enough CPE events the last 2 years for me, especially the last year, so not sure what I'm going to do.

I reckon there's going to be a lot of lapsed certs with no renewals moving forward. The process needs to adapt and change.

" Vendors' counterargument generally suggests that individuals and services organisations that claim expertise in a product or technology should be willing to invest in certifications to prove their skill "

That's a reasonable argument, provided the said certification does actually "prove their skills". I don't know the Red Hat ones, but most I've encountered, in general operational IT (and particularly in the security field), definitely don't. About the only really adequate ones at least used to be the Cisco hands on ones, as the proof was in the resulting configuration, but powerpoint based computer marked certs are, pretty much across the board, a complete waste of time and money. I say that advisedly having both regrettably taken, and (even more regrettably) delivered and authored them under contract.

Even supposing you can impart usable knowledge via slides in one week, it's impossible to test real competence using multiple choice tests, as the real skill is the ability to work out what the question is before answering it, but multiple choice not only provides the question - it actually prompts the answer. So all you get for your money a is a certificate of the ability to remember at best some formulaic concepts for around four days.

A certification of real value would require either a verified practical (as for Cisco) or a requirement to explain a topic. That means of course free form questions and subject-competent folks to mark them. Not only is that expensive to run, but there is evidence that these days a lot of candidates can't cope with that type of question regardless of their subject knowledge, as they have difficulty expressing their ideas clearly. So there's a problem for certification providers. Unless a high enough proportion of candidates pass, the cert goes out of favour and they lose the revenue. The practical solution is therefore to make it easier to pass, and that means multiple choice. As it's also cheaper to run, there's no argument against.

As with mainstream education, the ostensible outcome (of delivering capable people) has effectively got lost as other considerations take precedence.

Absolutely. And it's one reason I haven't bothered to renew or progress my LPI exam.

A job in the VFX sector came up recently and they sent over a "questionnaire" (well, a quiz) prior to *any* telephone or video calls that contained a list of technical questions that they expected you to answer. All of them could easily be looked up on the internet, including diagrams and a GitHub repository of Ansible playbooks to do what they asked. I find these things are a hindrance and are designed only to test's one Google-fu rather than actual knowledge, skills and experience.

I told them in no uncertain terms that I wasn't interested as a result. Bearing in mind that this is a company that I've been trying to tell for several years to put an SSL certificate on their Wordpress site, especially when they collect candidate information via a web form (you can't just email them).

Good luck to whoever gets that job.

Takes a few minutes of someone's time. It has been made very easy in later versions of WP alongside that getting a cert is simple these days.

If I can do it for my own blog (self-hosted on an RPI-4) then any decent IT company should be able to do it.

Well done for telling them to shove their job where the sun dare not shine (outside of Pronhub etc)

There's another issue here, too, which is that expensive certification is a barrier to competition: if people are heavily invested in a particular manufacturer, there's a strong incentive to stick with them and you get to the point where businesses are buying Product X because it's easy to find staff with X knowledge.

It also adds to a myth of sophistication: if Product X requires a training course, but product Y requires only that you read some documentation, it can be used to imply that Product X must therefore be more capable.

If you can get away with it, though, it's a great way to get your customers to pay you to write your documentation.

Each country's national certifications from schools, colleges and universities last a lifetime, so why should technology certifications be any different ?

The only reason expiry dates exist is to generate a constant income stream for the company, but this is counter-productive since nobody in their right mind would do x courses that need renewing every couple of years. The individuals wouldn't want to commit that amount of personal money and the companies they work for will not spend that amount of money unless there was a guaranteed way to make significantly more money from their spend.

As we all know, experience beats certification hands down each and every time.