Certification count is a measurement of capability of a consulting practice. At individual level it sometimes serves to navigate the learning journey, especially for engineers aspiring to advance to an adjacent technical area, for example, a network engineer moving to cloud engineer, or a data engineer transitioning to machine learning engineer. Personally I don’t find certifications the most efficient way to learn. However, it is the most measurable way. The market has a plethora of choices for certifications but the quality is not very consistent. Through years of studying for different certificates, I have learned to treat certificates as necessary evil and be extremely cautious before investing time to it. After I sat another exam yesterday, I decided to write down my views of certifications and alternative ways of studying a topic in cloud technologies.
Dosage of Marketing
A few years ago, I sat the Azure exams on AI fundamentals (AI-900) and AI engineer associate (AI-102). Out of the two I found the fundamentals one better, despite of lower level. That is because AI-900 focuses on the core concepts that are broadly useful. In contrast, the AI-102 exam, at least at that time, felt like a marketing exam all about what managed AI services Azure has for what kinds of problems. I’m not a fan of marketing exams but admittedly all these exams by cloud service providers contains some dose of marketing. You just can’t completely avoid marketing from these exams. It’s just a matter of how much. My first principle: be wary of the marketing scheme behind the exam.
Why is this important? We choose an exam because we want to dedicate precious time to learn. Unfortunately, the time we, aspiring IT engineers starting to study a new topic, is the time we are the most vulnerable to marketing schemes. Not only are we eagerly open to devouring the course contents, we’re also laser-focused and repeating a lot. This tunnel vision during the study allows biases to sneak in in favour of the products covered in the exam.
If you’re about to build a container platform and your first flash of thought is Elastic Container Service, you should congratulate Amazon on the marketing win. If your decision process relies too much on these mental shortcuts that you have developed during the exam preparation, you are developing a tendency of not being analytical to engineering problems. This makes you a worse engineer than you could otherwise have been.
A wise learner has be cautious about the dosage of marketing in these exams. One indicator of high dose of marketing, is the portion of questions focusing managed and unique services in the particular cloud service provider. The certifications by non-profit organizations such as CompTIA and Linux Foundations tend to have low dose of marketing in the exams.
Stability of Topics
The time studying an exam is an investment. We want the certification to remain stable over the course of several years. New certification exams should only launch under rigorous review of the necessity, maintainability and the direction should not change drastically. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Let me pick on AWS specialty exam this time. If you have been in the certification game for long, you might remember the following specialty certifications:
- Big Data specialty — launched in Oct 2016, and deprecated in Apr 2020 in favour of Data Analytics specialty and Database specialty
- Data Analytics specialty — launched in Apr 2020, retired in Apr 2024
- Database specialty — launched in Mar 2020, retired in Apr 2024
- SAP on AWS specialty — launched in Apr 2022, retired in Apr 2024
- Alexa Skill Builder — launched in May 2019, retired in Mar 2021
These changes are a main reason I am very hesitant to go for specialty certifications with AWS. Some even had a lifespan of less than two years. In my opinion, learning is worth it but spending time on those short-lived certificates is a completely waste of time. In Lindy effect, the longer a non-perishable item has been around, the longer it’s likely to persist into the future. Technologies such as TCP/IP, Unix, Object Oriented Programming, have been around for decades and yet still profoundly impact a production system today. Only lasting knowledge is worth more time.
As of spring 2024, AWS introduced two certificate level exams: Data Engineer Associate and Machine Learning Engineer Associate. So it seems that some specialty certifications are being consolidated into the associate-level. All previous associate-level exams had been around for more than a decade. Given that record of stability, I decided to venture the AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate certification.
Breadth and Depth
The next important factor to consider is the breadth and depth of certification exams.
Some certifications are targeting different audiences. For example, I personally regard the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner as targeting non-technical folks and would not carry much weight for an experienced cloud engineer. On the other hand, I chose AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate over the Machine Learning Specialty because the latter targets data scientists and is a lot more demanding on theories. Even if I grind it out there wouldn’t be opportunity in my day-to-day responsibility to digest and reinforce what I have jammed in my head.
I’m dubious on certifications for a single tool but there seems to be more and more of them these days. The only exception is if the tool plays such a crucial and fundamental role in the IT systems, and it is complex but there is no alternatives. For example, Red Hat as a classic distribution of Linux operating system, Kubernetes as a complex container orchestration service. However, certifications on single tools such as Prometheus, Istio, Cilium, and Terraform, are just too narrow to worth the effort. In my opinion these certifications provide very limited return on investment. We just need to learn these tools as we go with documentations, or go through the essential workshops.
Upkeep
Renewal requirement is another consideration, especially if the organization requires your active certification status. Having a streamlined renewal process is a big plus because once certified our main duty is on the actual work. Kudos to the Azure certifications that only require a shortened free on-line exam for renewal. It is quite a hassle to have to retake the exam again. The validity of the certification is also subject to arbitrary changes. For example in 2024 Linux Foundation changed the validity of CKA exam from 3 years to 2 years.
Certification inflation is real. There might have been a time when they measure one’s competency in the technical field. But today very few of them can differentiate one’s technical competency, thanks to Goodhart’s law. In addition to the certification inflation, another threat to the value is the question leaking. The longer the exam has been administered, the more likely the questions are leaked all over the place. This gives an unfair advantage for users of question dumps. And because the scores are scaled results, this systematically penalize honesty, and ultimately impairs the value of the certification.
More ways of learning
Last year I had a number of certifications all up for renewal, I gave up many of them that are time-consuming. They did help with learning but only up to certain extent. Unfortunately, so long as I work in consulting I still have to live with it. As a result, I learned to be very picky about which ones to pursue to get the most value of my time.
At the end of the post, I must reiterate that I don’t personally find certifications are best way to learn. In the preparation, I always tend to focus on acing the exam itself. Over the years, I’ve also used a few other ways in my learning, and can summarize them as such:
- certification exam: most measurable but least effective in my experience.
- online courses: highly dependent on the quality of the course. many are just workshops
- workshops: my preferred way going into a new topic
- side projects: most effective but requires a real-life problem and can be time consuming
- quality white paper: an effective way of learning going into new topic in a systematic way
- read a book: as long as the book content is up to date, this is the most systematic approach
- blogging: effective but time-consuming.
I hope every cloud engineers can also choose certifications wisely and maximize their leanring.