CompTIA Security+ Certified

I am now officially CompTIA Security+ Certified. I was required to get a "security certification" for my new job (at their expense, yeah!). Now, given the choice I would have asked if I could get training as a Red Hat Certified Security Specialist, but that was a little over the top when it comes to funds.

Overall I enjoyed studying for the exam and in the end scored nearly 100%. In preparation, I read through CompTIA Security+ Deluxe Study Guide and used the Pass4sure practice exams provided by my employer.

While I was familiar with the basics of many of the concepts, the study guide went into some detail and discussion I had not looked at before. The book also helped with learning the endless sea of acronyms. There is an appendix in the back that is a good reference for these acronyms. There is also some further discussion in the appendix that is worth reading in preparation for the exam. However, I found the labs in the study guide pretty lacking in anything useful to me.

The biggest issue I've found taking the exam is if you have a lot of experience, sometimes it is difficult to reason between two good answers as to which one the exam thinks is "best." This is where the Pass4sure exams came in handy as they also had the same mentality as the exam. This helped in understanding what the exam thinks is best and why. Once I had the knowledge required and understood the thought process of the authors of the exam, it was fairly straight forward.

The most interesting part of this experience? I was approached at work by someone who was baffled as to how in the world I passed the exam. Four years experence of teaching astronomy at UVU kicked in and I said you need to study and understand the concepts if you want to pass the exam. When I said this, they freely admited to not really wanting to learn anything from the experience and just wanted to "learn how to pass the exam" by using the practice tests. A tip of my hat goes out to CompTia from making sure the exam is not passible by just studying the practice exams.

Question is, while I made this experience worthwhile, is this certification resume-worthy or worth anything in the real world?