Are Linux Technicians on the rise?

Mark,

Certifications of any kind are useful to show an employer that a candidate has made an effort to gain it (self-study is also more impressive as cram classes tend to produce less-knowledgeable techs). As far as Linux goes, a lot of commercial organizations are wary because it is free and open-source so it appears right now to be on the edge of legitimacy for commercial apps (no insult to Linus Torvalds intended). However, because of its similarity in syntax and command line to UNIX, Solaris, etc. I would recommend taking the time to be proficient at it as the transition to UNIX is much easier from Linux than Windows (trust me on this one :) ).

Hope that helps,

In and of itself, any given certification is not terribly useful without being bundled with experience and/or demonstrable skills. For example, I assume you are taking the RHCE course for RH 7.0? What I would suggest, in addition to grabbing the cert, is that you have your own RH server up, with some samples of your work.

Of course, this assumes that you are trying to leverage the RHCE cert for job hunting. Personally, unless you work for a company where Linux is used in the enterprise, the cert is not as valuable as, say, an Oracle DBA cert.

Chris
Former Recruiter