Look, for a work seeker being able to append an MCSE qualification together with the A+ and N+ that accompanies it to their CV is probably a good thing. It affords a slight advantage over other candidates who have nothing to add to their CV but experience.

Well let me state clearly – I will ignore the MCSE on your CV as of today, along with your N+ and A+ that you paid lots of money to earn. I will throw CV’s of raw MCSEs out in favor of unqualified candidates with even a few months practical experience.

Want to know why?

Looking for a Junior Technician

Recently our company has started looking for a junior technician to expand our technical team. As the guy who is in charge of finding said proby I decided to put an ad on a jobs site that also printed the ads in a paper.

The applications came in, soon about 120 odd people applied.

The ad clearly stated the offered salary, the region and that School Leavers where wellcome. It clearly said “Junior Technician.”

Every yahoo in a hundred mile radius who had just completed the A+ N+ MCSE course sent in their CV.

We where able to whittle down the candidates by eliminating the few outright bad candidates (wrong region, salary requirement too high, a few BSC and BCOM graduates [what where they thinking...] and even a lone Managing Director) and end up with under a hundred applicants.

Out of that hundred we narrowed it down again (age), all of them MCSE qualified, and then again to where we had the top 11 candidates.

That Top 11

Being eager to find the correct candidates I drew up a questionnaire of ten questions that I thought would give me an idea of a candidates technical prowes, lack thereof, or his/her knack for finding a solution.

I was perfectly confident that all 11 candidates would have no trouble answering the questions – especially since they where all certified.

Of the 11 only four took the trouble to answer them.

Three questions stood out that I want to discuss as part of my piece tonight.

1. What is the difference between a /24 subnet and a 255.255.255.0 subnet?
   This one should be pretty straightforward to a certified technician. There is no difference between the two. Only two of the four got it right! Of the two, the one candidate simply googled the answer and pasted the first result verbatim. The other answers included a claim that one was class C and was thus different from the other, and another simply stating that in both “only 255 IP addresses are available since 0 and 256 are reserved.”
2. Given the above answer, look at the following example. Whitch of these computers will not be able to access the internet (assuming the ADSL is correctly set up etc) and explain why not. (Answer with the letter [a,b,c,d] only, provide multiple solutions if necessary)
   - a) Computer IP = 192.168.0.2 and Gateway IP = 192.168.0.254
   - b) Computer IP = 10.0.0.2 and Gateway IP = 10.0.0.121
   - c) Computer IP = 192.168.1.2 and Gateway IP = 192.168.0.254
   - d) Computer IP = 192.168.1.2 and Gateway IP = 192.168.1.2
   Not one of the candidates got this right. Of a, b, c and d, d would not be able to access the internet outright, and c would not be able to access the internet unless you where on a /16  or /8 subnet. All of the responders answered b! B IS NOT CORRECT! Even the guy who googled everything got this one wrong.
3. Name one command, and use an example of syntax, that would allow you to do all of the following: Get HTTP information from a page, send mail and/or check if an smtp server is online, check the HELO on a pop server. Provide an example of the command for at least one of the above.
   Only one candidate responded with TELNET and an example of telnet smtp.isdsl.net 25. Of the other three google guy responded with “C:/ bmail”, one responded with “I don’t know” and another with “Don’t understand the question.”

Really. These are certified technicians.

Interviews

I decided to invite three of the four for interviews, partly out of desperation to find someone, and partly out of a morbid curiosity.

In the interview I would give them a router, a laptop and a switch with their cabling and ask them to connect them in order to build a simple LAN.

One candidate could do it. One other genius linked the laptop to the single port router with the one CAT5 cable, and the router to the switch with the CAT4 adsl cable, wedging the RJ11 in a RJ45 port on said switch.

That done, I would take one of their answers to my questions and ask them to perform the answer for me on a computer that was set up in the interview.

One guy answered that he would use tracert in order to find out where packets got lost on the way to a webpage, yet he could not do it on the computer. He typed in “trace” on the command-line (after I told him where to find it) and stared blankly at the screen when nothing happened.

Another answered in the questions that he would use nslookup to find out the mx records for a domain name. He entered “nslookup” in the Firefox address bar. Sure that takes you to a webpage that does what the nslookup command does, but not what I had wanted from the candidate.

He could not do an nslookup from the command line.

Summary

I am not exaggerating, I sat in our boardroom today – mortified at the skills displayed by young people who passed one of the most lauded IT qualifications out there.

I have lost all my faith in the MCSE model. I have said before that a raw MCSE is useless, but now it has been confirmed in my eye beyond doubt. Add to that list A+ and N+. Without some experience they mean nothing to the employer.

I do believe though that they are good candidates for entry level positions if you are willing to train them and spend a lot of time teaching them, well, everything they need to know.

You might as well find yourself a willing school leaver and train them up from scratch. The difference between a  school leaver and an MCSE is that the MCSE thinks he knows. He doesn’t.

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