| The thing is that there are exceptions to the rule. In the right hands, a certification course can be a valuable credential. If you take a person off the street and put him through a PT certification course, that doesn't make him an engineer. However, you can take a competent engineer and put him through the same training and the end result can be very positive.
Learning from the creators of the software is win-win in my eyes. Price, and cool hat aside, there is no better place to learn the software then from the ground up, so that you may decide your own workflow, and not that of someone else who figured stuff out for themselves (which is potentially dangerous ... trust me, i've been in sessions with very big name engineers [ones that you all would know] that have done some potentially disasterous stuff because they don't know any better). The thousands of pages of technical, and practical education contained in the certification courseware, and the hundreds of hours of hands on classtime during the couses cannot be seen as a waste by any means. In the hands of the right inividual, it can be seen as invaluable.
On the other hand, if one were to rely on the education as being the means to obtain employment, they'd have another thing coming ... A lot of employers either a) don't really know what it is, or what's involved, or b) give a shit.
Yes, it is stupidly expensive ... no, I did not have to pay for mine.
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