GARYM , I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it forced you to learn Oracle better.

My wife was a MS Access trainer ... she never did a lot of development with it before getting certificated and even less when she was teaching the course.

On the other hand I learnt the product by working with it for a number of years. She would often present me with tough problems that came up in one of her classes where I was able solve only because of my experience. On the other hand she would often point out a cleaner way to do some task or point me a direction I never new existed.

So in my experience certification can only make you that much better and is well worth the investment in time and money.

Gee