I have earned multiple paid certifications a year non-stop for 24 years, mainly because a perk of working with one of my clients is unlimited payment for certification tests if you can pass two pre-tests above 94%
So each quarter I push myself to learn a new area and get a certification
Over these 24 years, these certifications have gotten zero recognition and have never come up when interacting with any other client
I don't know what industries care about certs, but I have never found the certifications themselves to be worth anything beyond the pride it might bring you to have earned it and whatever you learned in preparation.
No employer, client, or even colleague has ever brought up certifications that I can recall... All of this to say, if you do decide on a course of study, do it to actually learn and build the desired skill. The test/cert is not going to provide any other value in today's market.
rkomorn•1h ago
Kudos to you. That's genuinely impressive.
leakycap•1h ago
That's kind, thanks - I'm thinking of stopping at 100 certifications and letting a few I've kept up/renewed over the years expire.
When I first started, my favorite series were from Microsoft - excellent courses and I learned concepts. CompTIA is my least favorite, the exams don't seem to require deep knowledge.
Lately, the only exam I've taken where the prep really taught me a lot was Red Hat Certified Engineer which will help as automation works its way into everything
Bender•1h ago
In my career the only time certifications came up was for a B2B relationship where the customer wanted {n} people to be certified in AIX or HP-UX. There was also a B2B customer that wanted {n} people to have RHCE's for Redhat because they were using it for Oracle and the DBA's had to be trained on Oracle. But that's it really. I have never seen anyone in leadership care about it at any company I interviewed at for the purposes of hiring.
leakycap•1h ago
> I have never seen anyone in leadership care about it at any company I interviewed at for the purposes of hiring
This mirrors my experience, unfortunately.
> B2B relationship where the customer wanted {n} people to be certified in AIX or HP-UX.
I would have loved to do an AIX or HP-UX cert to understand the system-level differences, but they were never on offer as part of what was free. I did take the Oracle Linux exam a few years back and found it uselessly specific, so maybe I didn't miss anything with those first two.
Bender•1h ago
so maybe I didn't miss anything
You did not miss much in my opinion. AIX and HP-UX market share are much smaller than Linux now. There are some concepts that Linux could benefit from but that's down in the weeds. e.g. system management tools that can do very advanced configurations but also log what commands it executed in the background so it can be used to learn advanced techniques and quickly debug when something goes wrong.
leakycap•2h ago
So each quarter I push myself to learn a new area and get a certification
Over these 24 years, these certifications have gotten zero recognition and have never come up when interacting with any other client
I don't know what industries care about certs, but I have never found the certifications themselves to be worth anything beyond the pride it might bring you to have earned it and whatever you learned in preparation.
No employer, client, or even colleague has ever brought up certifications that I can recall... All of this to say, if you do decide on a course of study, do it to actually learn and build the desired skill. The test/cert is not going to provide any other value in today's market.
rkomorn•1h ago
leakycap•1h ago
When I first started, my favorite series were from Microsoft - excellent courses and I learned concepts. CompTIA is my least favorite, the exams don't seem to require deep knowledge.
Lately, the only exam I've taken where the prep really taught me a lot was Red Hat Certified Engineer which will help as automation works its way into everything
Bender•1h ago
leakycap•1h ago
This mirrors my experience, unfortunately.
> B2B relationship where the customer wanted {n} people to be certified in AIX or HP-UX.
I would have loved to do an AIX or HP-UX cert to understand the system-level differences, but they were never on offer as part of what was free. I did take the Oracle Linux exam a few years back and found it uselessly specific, so maybe I didn't miss anything with those first two.
Bender•1h ago
You did not miss much in my opinion. AIX and HP-UX market share are much smaller than Linux now. There are some concepts that Linux could benefit from but that's down in the weeds. e.g. system management tools that can do very advanced configurations but also log what commands it executed in the background so it can be used to learn advanced techniques and quickly debug when something goes wrong.