Certification != Knowhow
My neighbor brought over his Win7 laptop for me to make work again. Seems his Microsoft certified cousin "fixed it". He (among other blasphemies) failed to back up the personal data, removed the virus protection, and clobbered Office 2007. My wife took her laptop into a large retail chain's IT shop (rhymes with Greek fraud) over my objections (she didn''t want to bother me with a simple Vista to Win7 upgrade) and they, after promising no personal files, emails, contact lists or setups would be lost, lost it all. It took me two days to put it back together from old backups. A+ certified indeed. I've worked with PMPs that could only repeat" "Can you have it done by Friday?" with no help in planning or providing resources. At the last place I worked full time I trained the guy with the Oracle certification (I saw the card) on how to program and configure Oracle. And I've worked with PhDs in computer science that did not know how to program.
Having no certifications aside from my CS degree my problem is being rejected after the last three interviews as being "over-qualified".
These certificates certainly would help an HR person weed out applicants and that alone would justify getting them - just so you get to the front of the line and don't get rejected prior to an interview - but they do not prove ability to solve IT problems. They prove you can pass written exams.
Final note: Be wary about buying training for these certification exams. I vetted a couple of training systems for a big health group IT department a couple of years ago and almost everything in the practice exams was wrong.
