I'm curious, have you taken an MCP/MCSD exam?

personally, i very strongly agree with all these but not as strongly about getting a cert. I think its a good thing, but I've only ever gotten certs to meet department/personal goals so I don't have as much stock in it.

shameless plug coming..

the friend could read my beginning IT careers post, but is probably beyond it if he's been in dev before.

computeristsolutions.com/.../Beginning-IT-careers-for-humans.aspx

here's the for humans series; might have something interesting for your friend.

computeristsolutions.com/.../for-humans.aspx

I have recently given several presentations on preparing for tech job interviews which should definitely help your friend.  I've posted the article on my blog in both PDF and PowerPoint 2007 versions. You can find it at www.mknopf.com/.../preparing-for-technical-job-interviews.html

I concur with everything, although I do question the value of certs.

As an MSCD myself, I was kinda appalled at some the company I kept. However, I do think there's (some) value in it, especially for junior level devs.

Couldn't agree stronger about the value of principles over technical expertise.

I agree that reading is supplemental to actually getting in code, but I think it's very important.  

When I hire, I ignore certs entirely.  I've interviewed way to many people who have them who don't know the first thing about development.  I have two MCP certs myself and I remember how silly the exams were.  Granted, I don't think they hurt either and I'm sure there are plenty hiring managers out there (mainly those who've never written the exams) who value them.

But I do think most of your points are good, but should probably be renamed "Revitalizing Technical Knowledge".  The reason I say that is I find that most interviews I've had over the past 15 years are by people who aren't very strong technically.  Sure, you get a few who are, but they tend to focus on silly questions about syntax.  

I yet to have an interview where I've been asked about general development principals.

I'm not saying that is all bad, one benefit is that these are obviously companies that could use your help, and if you play your cards right you can definitely excell in that environment and really make a positive impact on their environment.

All I'm saying is that a large portion of the companies hiring out there have never even heard of the SOLID principals, et al., so learning them won't automatically kickstart your career.

But overall, that is all very good advice for someone trying to get back into development after some time off.

I'll second your suggestion of having a side project; I just started one, and it's been a) more enlightening, b) more fun than any other thing I've tried.

I agree with persuing some certification,  it focuses your path what to learn; especially if you do not have a starting point.  Certification teaches technolgy\syntax it does not teach best practice, for this read blogs.   Certification from an employer perspective indicates the person has been exposed to certain areas of the technology, albeit they may not be experts.

@Andrew I could not disagree more about disregarding certification.   It shows seriousness, dedicatin and some commitement on the individuals part.  The trick however is in the interview phase is to determine wheter the person really learnt the technolgoy or braindumped it.   I would far hire enthusiasm, dedication and commitment.  However, having said this it is not mandatory and should not detract from a canditate.

These suggestions are good.

Brett,

I'm not saying certifications are bad, I am just saying they aren't good.  Basically, I ignore them because I don't feel they give any sort of indication if a candidate is going to be good or bad.

For example, years ago I worked for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner (or whatever we were called), part of our certification requirements were that we needed X amount of MCP exams between our employees.  A few days before our partnership review we realized we were one short, so I went to Borders and picked up the Xml Web Services for C# Exam Prep book.  I was allowed to take the afternoon off and I wrote the exam at 9am the next morning.  My experience with webservices was very (very, very) limited at that time, but I still passed with flying colours.

That is a rare case, but that has always stuck with me when I see certifications on resumes because I easily crammed for an exam using a book provided by the people who created the exam (I always thought that was a massive conflict of interest) and passed.

Again, I'm not saying they're bad, but they really don't tell me anything about the person.  If they want to show me dedication and commitment, show me that they are constantly learning new things or are part of a community.   That impresses me.  

Thank you for submitting this cool story - Trackback from DotNetShoutout

How exactly is a podcast "interactive"? Surely that's only true if you're in it, interacting with someone else.

Listening to podcasts is not interactive in any way.

In any case, they are usually poor vehicles for explaining technical concepts, IME

Actually, I think the MCSD program really helped me when I was first learning .Net 1.1.  For one, it gave me motivation to research a wide array of .Net topics I wouldn't have otherwise cared about.  Much of it didn't apply to my then ASP.Net development job and it gave me insight into what else was available.  Obviously you can just do brain dumps and take the tests, but if you really use it as an opportunity to research the breadth and depth of the framework it can be really valuable and definitely make you a better developer.  It also did help me land jobs back then when the first web bubble burst.

I was about to post something very similar to what Eric wrote.  I found getting the MCAD a rewarding experience.  However, I do agree that certs are only guaranteed to demonstrate that the person with the cert can memorize material and take an exam.

I think certifications provide great exposure to the target technologies, even for seasoned pros.  My experience has been that it's easy to pass certification exams without studying for them as long as you've been working with the technology, but I'm always pleasantly surprised to find that forcing myself to read through a 700 page exam study guide yields some useful tidbits of information I wasn't aware of.

On another (nitpicky) note, MCSD exams have been retired.  Gotta go MCPD from now on...

All the suggestions so far have been very conventional.  If you're very talented and / or very lucky, you may get a good job with a good company and work on some interesting projects.  More likely, you'll find your career in need of more revitalization pretty quickly.  Either way, you will probably have to slog your guts out and you're not going to get rich making money for someone else.  Your best bet is to reduce your dependency on working for a company as an employee and to take greater control of your own destiny.

Recently I was faced with the challenge of switching job. I used to work in classic VB and .Net 1.1 and when I decided to update my skills I was confronted with lot of abbreviations...  WPF, WCF, WF, WTF ;) etc... Blogosphere didn’t help either... TDD, DDD and other DDs... While trying to make sense out of this, heaven smiled upon me in the form of Karl Seguin! If you are too eager to catch up with the current development practices, you need Foundations of Programming by Karl... It will get you to about 100 meters from the bleeding edge best practices in no time... Thanks Karl!

@All,

Has anyone else ever interviewed a tech trainer?  The ones I have worked with or interviewed have had stacks of cert on their resumes and can quote the MS training manuals.  Ask them to code the Fibonacci series (after you define it for them) on the white board and rather than ask, "iterative or recursive" they make excuses for 5 minutes and then tell you which resource they would look it up in.

@Jim,

You just made the jump back from manager to developer, what was your technique?  I mean, other than just apply for a new job in a dev role rather than manager?  Your were fairly involved with the team you managed, even to the point of pairing with us when you weren't in meetings, so maybe it is a different situation.

@All,

Hey, there is an idea!  Pick a Senior Dev from the team you manage and go pair with them as much as you can.  Pairing is the best way I have ever found to transfer knowledge from from one dev to another and that should remind your friend of the things he doesn't use much anymore.

"I easily crammed for an exam using a book provided by the people who created the exam (I always thought that was a massive conflict of interest)"

Of course it is not a conflict of interest. First you pay them for the exam, and then you also pay them for the book. That's a win-win for the cert provider.

My take on cert is like this: Is there a chance that you get some edge because you have NO cert, and your competitor has it? (Let's say, skills and experience being about the same). I don't think so.

What if you have the cert, but the other person does not? Well, I'd say there is some chance it will be viewed favourably.

So, if it's really a question of studying for 1-2 evenings, why not get it? There's nothing to lose.

Tools

I recently landed a job in part because of my MCSD.  An internal recruiter for the company found my resume on Monster.  She told me that she did a search for ".NET Developers" in my area and came up with hundreds of results.  After narrowing the search to those with MCSDs, she was left with four candidates (including me).  That got me an interview.  Without the MCSD, I would've been lost in a sea of candidates.  Pretty nifty.