Request for advice

[Dru Lavigne]

> Hello,
> I'm currently planning on taking the BSD Association
> certification, as described here.  (http://www.bsdcertification.org/)
> 
> Although I am primarily doing so for personal, rather than
> economic reasons, I did want to ask whether or not it
> possibly *would* add to a resume, in the opinions of people
> here.  As much as I've loved using FreeBSD myself, I've
> been looking for trend and market share numbers on the Web
> recently, and what I've found has been fairly depressing;
> the indication usually seems to be a gradual, long term
> decline of the three major BSDs, with virtually all UNIX
> market share moving in the direction of Debian Linux. 
> With that said, I've also noticed that FreeBSD is still
> visible on Netcraft's list of the most reliable ISPs.
> 
> I consider this tragic, because after close to 15 years of
> at least intermittent use of both systems, I have developed
> a belief that FreeBSD is vastly technically superior to any
> form of Linux that I have used, including Debian.
> 
> So I wanted to ask; how possible is it still, to become
> gainfully employed as a BSD administrator?  Once I have
> the BSD certification, will it be necessary to concede to
> reality, and also seek certification in Linux as well? 
> I have long considered that idea, but the problem is that
> Linux training generally costs a minimum of $2,000, and I do
> not have that type of money available.


Disclaimer: I'm the current chair of the BSD certification group (BSDCG).

The BSDCG gets requests quite often from employers who are looking for admins with BSD skills. We refer them to our BSDA certified linked in group as its members are all BSDA certified. There is also a linkedin group for those interested in BSD certification which is a good resource for networking with other admins who are interested in BSD.

We have also received several reports back from certificants indicating that the reason why they were hired over someone else was because they were BSDA certified.

I wrote an article for the February issue of BSD Mag (available for free download from bsdmag.org) that describes why one would want to be BSD certified, even if not motivated by economic reasons or even if one is already happily employed.

Bottom line, if you're interested in system administration, the more Unix-like skills that you can get, the better. A Linux certification will only provide a subset of these skills. Having both Linux and BSD certification provides a fuller skillset.

Cheers,

Dru