Validity of certification

How many folks who get certified actually know what they are doing?

That very well may be the most asked question from hiring IT managers these days. In all fairness to Cisco exams, they are making the exams more indicative of real world scenarios. This is especially true with the abundance of simulation questions that are present in all of the Cisco exams. Unfortunately, even with the rising difficulty in the exam question scenarios and the simulations, there are still means of becoming a "paper tech." If you are hard pressed to find out (say in an interview), I would recommend quizzing them with questions that match your expectation level of a candidate.