An Apple Certification?

I have taken a cynical approach to the idea of any form of IT certification ever since Microsoft retired their NT 4.0 certifications.

Maybe it was sour grapes on my part after I had just passed my NT 4 Server exam about a month earlier; I don’t know.  These things aren’t cheap to attain when you take into account the dollars that you spend to attain the certification as well as the cost of study guides and in some cases, instructor led courses.

These can mount into the thousands of dollars for a certification that can become worthless if the vendor decided as Microsoft did to retire a given platform.  It really just annoyed me that the platform retirement seemed to come out of the blue, seemingly a grab for cash.  I understand that support people need to keep their skills updated and that all software does become useless at some point, it just seemed a huge waste of money.

So I am having mixed feelings about trying to attain an Apple certification; currently I’m looking at the ACSP (Apple Certified Support Professional) certification in the first instance.

Has anyone attained one of these certifications and was there any discernible benefit for your efforts?