IT certifications - Are they worth ?

With the proliferation of IT, and as the field is independent of the academic education, being based on "logic", high salary, and requirement of only scarce commodity i.e. "analytical skills" gave rise to every tom, dick and harry running behind this career ignoring those quoted attributes. So there was emergence of large number of institutes making more claims than actually providing the necessary training as required by the industry. Most institutes got authorization from giant technology vendors like Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, RHL etc. and have actually started running the shops; their widespread advertisement campaigns in a way have charged the youngsters so much that they have started thinking that such trainings and certifications are the ONLY thing they should acquire to leap into the lucrative career of IT. The pious purpose of introduction of the concept of certifications seem to have lost somewhere in this marketing whirlpool. University degrees are observed to be loosing their importance to these certifications, and from Indian perspective, where the mindset is to acquire just a piece of citation, is a dangerous situation. The courses, unless offered by experienced (exposure in the real field) people, can never be effective. When you are attended by a counselor in an institute watch these points -

• who is the faculty?
• for what duration he/she has worked in the industry and which companies?
• which are the projects he/she participated in?
• for how long he has been in teaching?
• insist on meeting the faculty and verify all these claims made by the counselor.
• don't run behind "live project", there is nothing like it in reality, no training institutes can get & offer such projects.
• don't run behind "certification", IT industry is more of skill oriented than certificate oriented. (visit : #-Link-Snipped-#)
• don't run behind "job guarantee", there is nothing like this can ever exist.
• ask yourself, if your academic degree offered by a recognized university should be important or certification offered by a private agency, not controlled by any university.
• If certification would have been so important, then would these companies Microsoft, Oracle, Informatica, Cisco, Infosys, TCS, ... have ever visited the campuses to select their candidates?
• 95% of professionals working in the industry were not certified to start with.

I hope this post would be helpful for the readers. Post your questions here for any doubts.