I work for a small public company who are pushing us to innovate all the time on a shoestring budget. Sometimes we do well, sometimes not so well, generally we do ok. Recently we've been pushed into doing some of the Oracle certification programmes to ensure that everyone can prove their competency in their position. What's been especially appreciated was the fact that my company paid for the exam fee (which is somewhat of a rarity for us).
I'm all for this sort of certification, and in fact was already studying towards it, and so when I passed my OCJP recently I was keen to move up to the next stage, which is where I hit Oracle's "classroom experience" section of the certification paths. Turns out that a mandatory course in Java 7 is required for anyone wanting to sit the developer exam for Java 6.
Reasonable enough I figured at first, they want to push the new language features etc, but the majority of course offerings are covering java 7 from a non programmer perspective (and costing €800+) to do. since a requisite of the developer exam is to already know these basics this just leaves me feeling bitter about the scheme. It seems to me to be more of a money making system for Oracle where large companies with huge training budgets will fire people on. It's well out with my personal budget (and I don't see me ever getting funding for it).