Certifications
Know Your Stuff
Certifications can be great, even in tech.
Validate Competence & Build Trust
Prove a "level" of proficiency in a given technology.
Communicate to yourself and to others a learned & known set of skills in a particular area.
Do Work & Contribute to Stability
Learning details during a certification & preparation can ensure that tasks can be accomplished successfully with a depth-of-knowledge provided by the training.
Reliable work is important.
Grow
Learn more. Do More.
Become more than you were yesterday.
Certification Skeptics In Tech
The Landscape Is Always Changing
Technology is always moving, and tech is always changing. Even a single "tool" that is heavily depended on will probably at some point have breaking changes, contributing to a valid cert today becoming outdated tomorrow.
The Test Might Not Be Valuable
Knowing what a certification "tests" is often hidden. Was the test easy enough to google all the answers?
Was the test deep enough to "really" test for deep knowledge?
Good Certification UX
- Be alone in a room, validating there is no extra helping hands. It only takes seeing a single interview of an engineering candidates where the person on video is clearly not the same person that is speaking into a microphone to understand the value of having 1 human to deal with as a test reviewer. As an exam-taker, this requires individual knowledge of the material.
- Show an empty workspace, validating no cheat-sheets. Cheatsheets are easy to find, easy to make, and easy to hide from a camera, until the proctor requires the cert-taker to show the whole room and the whole workspace. As an exam-taker, this ensures that the knowledge of the material is 100% from within.
- No Headphones or Hats, giving an extra 'level' of assurance that the test taker is not taking any audio cues.
- No Dual Monitors, sharing the whole screen, validating that no software cues are being delivered. Savvy software users could come up with many ways to work around security, so requiring 1 monitor with full visibility over the content of the screen validates no software trickery.
- No Talking as to stop from recording the questions aurally during the certification.