Why certification is needed?

I am a OCP. Partially I can agree with your points. I do not want to consider examples from other DBAs experience here, because every body has their own views. So I would consider myself for the example. I started my IT career in 1984 with COBOL, FORTRAN as my primary languages. In those days RDBMS was not popular. Mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN ruled the IT world. In those days either people got training within the organization or they got it from commercial Institute. Whenever I went for interview, I was purely tested my mathematical and statistics knowledge and my ability to solve business problems with the help of programming languages.

When Oracle, Informix become popular in late 80s, many companies started to develop application software in RDBMS. I started to learn what RDBMS was and then learned Oracle. My statistics knowledge helped to learn Oracle very easily. There was no OCP at that time. And moreover OCP was not needed because the product itself was small. I have experience in Oracle 5.1, 6.0, 7.0, 7.1, 7.3, 8.0.4 and 8i. I never thought of becoming OCP because I thought it was of no useful to me, but I was wrong. When the product (Oracle software) becomes big, it is impossible to learn all the software by one person. One can become master in one or two areas. A doctor who studied medicine can not become a good civil engineer. If he wants to be a CIVIL ENGINEER, he has to pass the engineering degree.

In most of the interviews, the Human Resource Manager or CEO was not in position to ask technical questions in Oracle to the candidates. Hence, he would just verify that whether the candidate has passed OCP or not. The certificate helps the candidate to be scrutinized in the preliminary stage.

I do not think certificate alone would help DBA to become a master. With certificate and with experience one can become a good Oracle DBA.

I would like to give an example. Few months ago I interviewed a candidate who had a OCP but with less experience. I asked him, “How do you do hot-backup?”. The person replied me “What is hot-backup?”, and “he never heard about it”. The candidate did not know the difference between hot backup and cold backup, because he never did it in his career.

New features added in every release of Oracle. And if I want to use those features, first of all I must know what they are and how they can be used. When I started to prepare for the OCP, I learned a lot which I never used my earlier projects. The certification keeps DBAs up to the knowledge and ability to solve difficult problems.

I saw in my life many good DBAs who are not certified. I would not blame them, because they do not have necessity. They are all aged and well settled. As well as I interviewed many young persons who did OCP, but failed poorly in the interviews.


Conclusion:
Necessity is the mother of invention. 5 Years ago I would say OCP was not necessary. Today I feel OCP is necessary.

Could you post the years of experience of the DBAs you had appointed in your organization?