Certifications are screening points used to separate the wheat from the chaff. When I post a System or Network Engineer position in the newspaper, I'll get hundreds, maybe thousands of resumes. Only a small percentage of these will actually be qualified. How do I choose who to interview?
A person with certifications has a better chance of getting noticed than one without, particularly if they're good certifications (i.e., MCSE+I vs. MCP, CCNP vs. CCNA, CCIE vs. CCNO, etc...). Manufacturer certifications are very important to resellers and consultants, because they are required to maintain sales authorizations, discounts and support access. Having gone through the certification process myself, I also know that you do learn useful things even if you have years of experience in a technology. That doesn't mean there aren't excellent people out there without the wallpaper. (I have only the minimum certifications required for my company to be authorized and get discounts on the product lines we handle.) But with 500 resume's to screen, a non-papered person is going to have to put together one heck of a resume to distract me from the others with alphabet soup after their names.
