It's officially over....

[NeoGen]

Ah, you're in the IT business too.
Networks is a part of IT that I really put aside, and leave it to those who know it. Too confusing for me.

There's this guy at the company I work at that doesn't have a degree, but the man Knows networks (witk capital K!). He's been working on it for over 15 years and he can do things we don't even know it could be done.
He's got a certificate from Cisco, which I've heard that are a bit hard to get.

[Brucifer]

Things change fast in the IT world. And different companies do things different too. The degree is nice to use for an initial measuring stick, but what I've seen in the field is that the person that has the specific knowledge and abilities is the person in demand. A great many of the IT jobs go from mouth to mouth as companies just don't hand over their secrets and family jewels (data) to just anyone. There's a great number of people in the IT world that have not finished a four year degree. Where does it hurt them? Mainly when they start moving into supervisory/management roles. I know several superb techies that don't have their four year paper, but they basically name their price for work and have no problems finding work if they aren't happy with their status quo. And again though, these are techs, not engineers.