Education for your career is essential for individual growth. It also benefits the community of said topic. However, it can be difficult to show your expertise to companies you apply for. Certifications I think help try to close this gap. I wanted to give my thoughts on certifications that reflect the business world. This will specifically cover certifications in the IT sector as that is the field I work in. Throughout my professional career, I’ve heard mixed feelings on the matter and I find it interesting to talk about. Here, I will explain the positives and negatives of acquiring certs and how you can maybe use them to your advantage.
The Benefits
One of the major benefits of getting a certification is that it’s a resume builder. For many industries, they require people to be certified in a certain technology or vendor of products (Microsoft, VMWare, Cisco, etc.). When you search for a company, you can filter your job search based on the technology you validated knowledge for. Any sort of upper hand to stand out in showing what you’re proficient in help during this process.
Speaking of proficiency, getting certifications maintains your learning aspirations. The world is evolving at a quick rate, and we need to keep up. If you’re certified in the latest technology, product, procedure, etc., you’re essentially learning what your industry is working towards. It also shows your skillset and what you’ve invested in learning.
Finally, I think the culture of certifications has created a wave of online learning resources at our fingertips. These resources also provide a plethora of content to please many people. With so many at your disposal, it has brought competition which results in affordable prices to learn. I would say that is a great return on investment.
The Downsides
As you can tell, I give high praise to certifications. However, I’ve also realized they are not everything. Certifications are tricky as their difficulty ranges and that needs to be considered. For example, some certifications require just watching the video(s) and verifying you watched it. Others require you spend hours of time studying and applying the knowledge. Some have tests associated that are just multiple choice while some have lab-based tests where you’re applying your skills to a scenario. Keep in mind some tests have a mixture of both.
The point of the vast amount of learning resources can also be a negative. The learning industry has grown exponentially given this always keep learning methodology. To some degree, I think it has lowered the bar on resources. The age of the internet has shown how easy it is to start a website and get their “learning program” up and running very quickly. Companies might focus their efforts on marketing on getting customers to buy their course over investing in rich quality content to keep customers. Many resources are also only accessible behind a paywall. This makes it difficult at times to know if you’re getting valuable information with your money.
The biggest thing to know is…certification training doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the real world. Yes, many training processes have labs to simulate a real-world scenario, but it’s not enough to make it fully prepared. Just because you received the certification, doesn’t mean you get whatever job you want. There are many cases where people are certified in something, but in the interview, you don’t do well as you might’ve never applied all this knowledge yet.
My Thoughts
After considering both perspectives, I tried to take a hybrid approach. Understand even in my field, I’ve worked with people above me who do not have many certifications, but are wicked smart and know what they are talking about.
train for the role not for the certification. most importantly, training for yourself. With this in mind, I wanted to describe how I would leverage the use of certification training towards your success
I think a good idea is to use the certification as a form of motivation to learn something for your job. Once you’ve done enough research, you can then decide if you think it worth attempting to test for the certification. In my opinion, it becomes a win-win scenario. If you choose to take it and pass then you have progressed your skillset and have validated that on paper. If you do not, then you still have absorbed that knowledge that can still be used whenever you see fit. Your skills would be validated from the real-world experiences you deal with at work.
Takeaway
It’s definitely difficult to decide whether it’s truly worth being certified. You have to consider the full picture and understand the industry if it holds value. This was never to sway in either direction but simply provide my thoughts on this subject. I get advertised abundantly on “staying up to date” or “get certified now!” and I find it annoying.
If you take anything from this, just know that you’re more than a certification. What truly matters is the knowledge you retain (regardless from on the job or in a book) and how to apply those to your work. Before studying for anything, see how you would like to use that knowledge. Depending on use and what work you do, see if a certification is out there and if it’s even necessary to acquire.