Reflecting on certifications
Having just recently sat the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Certified SysOps Administrator - Associate exam, my time with the associate level certifications offered by AWS has come to an end. With the next step being at the more challenging professional level, I thought it would be useful to reflect on what I have learnt so far while working through the AWS certification pathway.
“Certifications are a proof of knowledge, but not experience”, is a phrase I have heard time and time again throughout my journey into the world of cloud infrastructure and DevOps. It’s a phrase that is both wise and extremely relevant now with all the major cloud providers offer their own certification pathways, meaning that there is an abundance of different certifications available for people to work towards. With that there comes a temptation to pass certifications for the sake of attaining them, which in my view, defeats the point entirely. What’s more, certifications effectively test knowledge, which is better than nothing, but they don’t always help candidates drill and practice knowledge-driven experience. That experience is ultimately what is most important when it comes to building safe, reliable, and highly available solutions in the cloud.
With that being said, I do think certifications can be a very useful tool to develop skills if framed in a certain way. For example, when I consider preparing for a certification, I considering the following to determine if it is a valuable use of my time:
Will preparing for the certification help to reinforce my knowledge of a service/framework that I am using regularly?
Will preparing for the certification help me upskill in a new technology/offering that I don’t currently use but will need in the future?
If the preparation for a certification can help me do one of those two things, then I believe it is a useful exercise to get certified. Passing the exam and attaining the certification is merely a bonus as the value is derived from the learning process in and of itself.
For instance, in my role as a software engineer at bp Launchpad, I have had the opportunity to dive deep and implement a pattern with interesting cloud services like AWS Systems Manager (SSM), AWS Organizations and AWS Single Sign-On (SSO). To help me do this, I used my preparation for the AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate certification as a tool for better understanding how the services could be deployed and integrated together with other services like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS CloudFormation. The AWS SysOps Administrator - Associate certification was the perfect choice in that regard since every one of the services I had to use was covered extensively in the exam itself.
All in all, I think the process of preparing for certifications like those offered by AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure can be a useful endeavour, especially for anyone looking to further their knowledge. With that assertion, there is a caveat, preparing for and passing certifications for the sake of it can ultimately lead to the unintended consequence of gaining the knowledge but not what is truly valuable, the knowledge-driven experience.