The Value of Certifications: Skills, Knowledge, and Professional Credibility

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Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Catchpoint. Look, 80 percent of performance and availability issues don’t occur within your application code in your data center itself. It occurs well outside those boundaries, so it’s difficult to understand what’s actually happening. What Catchpoint does is makes it easier for enterprises to detect, identify, and of course, validate how reachable their application is, and of course, how happy their users are. It helps you get visibility into reachability, availability, performance, reliability, and of course, absorbency, because we’ll throw that one in, too. And it’s used by a bunch of interesting companies you may have heard of, like, you know, Google, Verizon, Oracle—but don’t hold that against them—and many more. To learn more, visit www.catchpoint.com, and tell them Corey sent you; wait for the wince.

Pete: Hello, and welcome to the AWS Morning Brief. I am Pete Cheslock. Corey is not here. He's never coming back. No, I'm just kidding, he's just not joining us for the Friday Morning Brief for a little while. Maybe we'll invite him back as a guest, but until then, I'm again joined by Jesse DeRose. Welcome back yet again, Jesse.

Jesse: Thank you so much for having me, I am so happy that Corey has not figured out that we just reset all of his passwords to ‘1234’ and locked him out of everything.

Pete: We did add an exclamation point to the end, and we made it very secure, but I do think it’s the—

Jesse: Very secure.

Pete: —it’s the ultimate troll to essentially take over Corey’s podcast for a period of time—while of course, he's taking care of his children—and essentially just inviting him back as a guest on it. So, I think that'll be fun. Maybe we'll have to do that: invite him back as a guest on his own podcast.

Jesse: I love it.

Pete: Well, we're here today to talk about, maybe, potentially contentious topic certifications. Are they good, or are they a bag of crap?

Jesse: This is a spicy one. I'm excited for this conversation.

Pete: So, certifications, this is a business that's more profitable for AWS than SimpleDB is.

Jesse: Nailed it.

Pete: Their whole certification ecosystem has really just blown up. I mean, I've been a part of the Amazon ecosystem since nearly the beginning, working for a startup back in 2009 timeframe; we were very early, and there was no certification, there was no re:Invent. I mean, all that stuff came after. And just looking now at the amount of certifications that exist, you've got, kind of, your default Cloud Practitioner level, you've got Solutions Architect Associate Level, Developer Level, you've got Professional Level, you can be a DevOps Engineer Professional. 

But then, more importantly, they even have these specific specialties in addition, so you can have an advanced networking specialty, or an ML or data analytics. It's really interesting how this has just exploded across the ecosystem, and having been to many re:Invents, they put a good amount of effort into certifying a lot of engineers at those events. But Amazon certifications are actually not the only thing we're talking about today. It's a big part of what we're talking about, but there's a lot of certifications out there. And for a lot of people, that's how they got into the industry. So, there's potentially a lot of good, but that's not always the case.

Jesse: Yeah. I honestly have a lot of mixed feelings on certifications. And honestly, there's strongly mixed feelings on certifications. So, what I really want to talk about today is, are they good? Or are they crap? Are they things that are ultimately beneficial for you to sit for and to take, or are they a waste of your time? And honestly, I think it all really boils down to which certification you're looking at and what do you want to do with it? What's the ultimate end goal for getting this certification? Because that can ultimately really influence whether or not this certification is going to be worth your time and money.

Pete: Exactly. I mean, what is the point of these to begin with? I mean, other than being just a great cash cow for some businesses?

Jesse: Yeah, I like to think about it like—I compare it to a college degree. I know it's not but I think about it in the same sense of like—

Pete: See, that's a very spicy comparison for some people who have paid lots of money for a college degree—much like myself—to compare it to a certification, but I like where you're going with this, so give it to me.

Jesse: I'm sorry for all the listeners who just dropped off and returned back to the latest episode of the Adventure Zone or Serial. I appreciate for those of you who are still with us to continue on. For me, a certification can provide a lot of similar opportunities for a college degree in terms of, it's a way to validate your knowledge. It's a way for you to prove, “Hey, I understand these ideas, these concepts,” that maybe you wouldn't be able to validate otherwise. And it validates your knowledge externally, and it gives you the opportunity to show a potential employer, “Hey, I have proven that I am familiar with these topics related to your business, and that is why you should hire me, or that is why you should consider giving me this promotion or giving me this opportunity.” It really gives a candidate an opportunity to derisk yourself. And I have proof. I have third-party-validated proof that I am familiar with these things.

Pete: Look, Jeff Bezos personally signed—actually I don't know if that's the case. It's probably Andy Jassy—personally signed my certification. So, it's like Andy Jassy is giving me this job recommendation, and Andy Jassy’s stamp of approval.

Jesse: “Do you want us to get Andy Jesse on the phone? Because we can get him on the phone right now, and he can confirm that he personally approved me for this role.”

Pete: Exactly. I mean—and I, of course, say that he stamped mine. So, interestingly enough, I do not have any Amazon certifications, but you do Jessie.

Jesse: I do. I have the Solutions Architect Associate certification.

Pete: So, I have at various points in the last couple of companies I've worked at have looked at getting an Amazon certification, and honestly, I have had the same kind of thought processes you just mentioned, which was, what will this give me? And will it give me for my time, and let's not say the money aspect because, for all these scenarios that I'm dealing with, the company was going to pay for it.

Jesse: Sure.

Pete: So, that was less of a risk, but it is my time. I don't want to take it and fail it, and have to take it again; that's just wasteful. So, I’d want to spend some time preparing and reviewing. But if I were to get—at this stage of my career, having been working with Amazon for a long time, if I were to get a Cloud Practitioner or Solutions Architect Associate, does this open up any doors for me? And to be honest, at my stage of my caree...