Certification and the Career of the Architect

FYI I've been away on vacation in Ireland for a bit so now I have time to get back to regular blogging.

Does certification help an Architect's career? Could it even hurt it?

I've been surprised recently at the number of Java Architect job descriptions out there that would prefer, and sometimes require, certification - in particular the Sun Certification as an Enterprise Architect

Does certification help the Architect's career? Well in one sense it must given that employers are looking for it. In another sense though, do developers or other architects see such certification as beneficial to the overall skill level of an architect or to the performance of the team and the end-result of a successful application delivered on-time and on-budget?

Having taken the first part of SCEA, the multi-choice questions, and now waiting to study the next two parts, I can't help but feel that the certification, although a useful exercise, lacks an examination of many of the aspects of the day-to-day tasks required of an Architect.

For Example
- Managing competing, if not conflicting, priorities e.g. incoming bug reports vs. deliverable new functionality
- Managing stakeholders - especially "conflicting" ones
- Understanding and learning about business domain
- Great negotiation skills - not just on technical details to developers but to less technical folks
- Developer mentoring & Team confidence and morale building
- Risk identification, analysis & mitigation

Some might say that many of these items are in the purview of the job of the project manager but I think it must be a collaborative effort - Architects must have an opinion on what's more or less important and how to manage certain stakeholders and their expectations etc.

Also, admittedly, such skills are hard to "certify" but perhaps we need a "certification" program similar to PMP -Project Management Professional or CFP -Certified Financial Planner with much longer "trajectories" that tend to emphasize the continual learning required and re-certification needed after a number of years.

There are other Architect certifications out there too e.g. Microsoft, The Open Group etc . But overall I don't think the current certifications for Architects are bad for one's career as long as you realize that passing or excelling in these exams just signifies a level of knowledge you had at one time - I've seen a few purported SCJP certified programmers subsequently fail basic questions. Also many of the best Architects I know are just too damn busy and successful to take such exams.

My advice for those who do take such exams is to also take some programmer certifications also to avoid looking like a non-coding Astronaut Architect.

Also don't become one of those people who "collects" certifications - I've seen folks with 8+ certifications from Java to Microsoft to Oracle etc. I don't see such resumes too often but it always strikes me that such people are spending more time on the certifications rather than on the job they have or perhaps are trying a little too hard to impress or just want to job hop as fast as possible to get wherever it is they want to go. Or maybe they should just have a little more fun in their lives :-)

p.s. also note that the last time certifications were this hot was also during a hot job market - 1998-2000. I wonder why that correlation exists?