UX Certification - is it a good idea to pursue one?

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Hi. Hope this is the right sub for this question, but since I didn’t see UX…

I have been working on the web in a number of different postions for many years now. My last role was as a designer for a large IT company in their UX department. I got this position soley from my design/dev chops, since I don’t have any “formal” UX experience.

Long story short, I left that position a few months back and I am back out in the marketplace. For a while now I have thought that UX as a discipline is an underserved field. At our large company we had one guy, and he was pretty much always in demand.

Now that I am back to reading Help Wanted ads, I am indeed seeing a lot of demand for UX experience. Short of going back to school for a degree, can someone recommend me a good certification for helping me shore up this skill?

Thanks in advance.

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There really aren’t any industry-recognized certifications for web development.

Showing a portfolio of projects or mock-ups is the generally accepted approach.

However–if you’re working with .NET, there are UX exams you can take from Microsoft. That’s probably as close to industry-recognized certifications as you can get (albeit for a specific product, rather than UX as a whole).

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Thanks.

It sounds like short of a degree I would be wise to bone up on available materials in an effort to talk the talk. I would ask for recommendations re: authoritative UX resources, but I am guessing a search of this forum will get me what I am looking for.