MATLAB Certified Associate/Professional

Do we have any here? Just curious. It has been a while since it was released and I am wondering if any of the most esteemed contributors to MathWorks Answers have these certifications.

Answer 1

[John D'Errico]

It seems something that someone might find useful were they looking for a job out of school, a way to convince someone who has no other basis for knowing who you are or what you are capable of, that you do indeed understand the language. There will also be many companies who might choose to pay for certification for their employees.

Personally, I would find it as valuable to point at a useful tool or multiple tools posted on the File Exchange, especially tools that have received substantial (and good) peer reviews. If someone wants to know what you are capable of doing, I see no better way than to see a portfolio of your work, and one that has already been submitted to a peer review process. Hey, it is FREE too!

Think of it like this: I personally would generally not offer to write a job recommendation for someone I do not personally know quite well. However, if you can obtain a "well done" from me on the file exchange, you have accomplished something significant.

All of that does not say there is no purpose in such a certification, only that I personally have no need for it, nor would I worry much about it were I personally needing to hire someone. But then I tend to be pretty non-traditional in what I do too.

I know there are some employers who want/need to see your skills certified. Sometimes that is important. After all, I would not wish to have a surgeon operate on me who had not received the appropriate training, nor would I necessarily have much confidence in a lawyer who had not passed their bar exams. (Ok, I don't have much confidence in the law profession as a whole, so that may not be a good comparison.)

Answer 2

[Image Analyst]

Not me. I don't need it. I suppose if I were looking for another job it might help, but I'm not, and people already know me as the expert in MATLAB in my company so I don't need any additional certification. For what it's worth, I've heard the test is pretty easy for anyone who's been using MATLAB for a little while.

Answer 3

[Walter Roberson]

A MATLAB Certification gets you past the filters on jobs that are marked as requiring MATLAB Certification, but it doesn't do anything much for jobs that are marked as requiring MATLAB "experience". It is probably not of much importance for the kinds of job leads that you get by virtue of your reputation, but it can still matter.

I once saw a quite skilled friend of mine rejected for a job he could have done easily. There was a lot of politics involved in hiring at that (large) organization, a lot of claims of discrimination in the organization (some absolutely completely valid), so the insistence was on objectively demonstrated skills. If you had the right piece of paper then it "proved" that you had earned the interview by your abilities rather than by The Good Old Boys Club. If you had two people applying for the same job then evaluating which one is "better" (and so should be hired) can be considered very subjective, but if you can point to one as having a certification and the other doesn't, then you have provided some objective evidence that they have skills. When you have hundreds of people applying for the same job (not uncommon), then the objective criteria can be needed to get the pool down to a reasonable size.

There are some environments and some positions where the requirement is to hire the "best" person you can convince to work for you. But there are other environments where the individual employees are more like cogs in the wheel, required to do a reasonable job at a task that probably a lot of other people could do a very reasonable job of: in those environments if more than about 5 people apply, being strict on objective qualifications can be a practical necessity.