L' Eomot Inversé (9/12/2013)
A bit up the chain from first job in junior/trainee position, after between one and four years in employment, track record is a far better indicator than academic qualifications. A bit further up again, maybe hiring chartered professionals (as suggested by Jane Dunn) would be sensible but I'm not convinced that chartered status is not gameable. (Just to make it clear that I'm not displaying sour grapes about chartered status, I'll point out that my non-academic qualifications include chartered status as CEng, CITP, and CMath.)
If I was a hiring manager or tech interviewer on a regular basis I would ask the person for the related user ids they use on various tech sites. And then do a google such as jim p. site:sqlservercentral.com and then see what comes back.
If they don't have membership in any tech sites, then I'm going to look askance at the rest of their resume. They don't always have to be answering questions, but let's see what questions they have asked (and how much guidance they needed).
We just had a newbie ask a question on another site. He was wanting to put a barcode on envelopes. He couldn't understand that a barcode is just a text box with a different font attached to the Excel data. Seeing that question would have told me he was not who I am hiring. Now seeing the question occurred five years ago would temper the reaction.
----------------
Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.