I am working in IT and some of my colleagues are talking about getting certifications for a particular domain within our field of work. These certifications are expensive and requires time and effort. So are they worth getting?
I am working in IT and some of my colleagues are talking about getting certifications for a particular domain within our field of work. These certifications are expensive and requires time and effort. So are they worth getting?
I’m an industry professional in ICT with 40 years experience.
I’ve come to form the view that industry certification is a vendor lock-in process created solely for the purpose of generating a guaranteed income stream for that vendor.
If your employer wants to spend its money on certification, by all means go for it as a learning experience.
If you have to pay for it yourself, I’ve yet to see any evidence that they represent a return on investment of any kind in your career.
That’s not to say that learning should be abandoned, quite the opposite. In this industry, if you’re not learning, you’re going backwards.
Stay curious, read verociosly and try to figure out how stuff works and more importantly, how it breaks.
For real, if you haven’t already try to find every bit of employer-paid training that’s available, it’s worth looking into. My workplace has a corp Microsoft learning account that will pay for one certification test a year, and other deals with online training platforms for free classes that don’t result in “certificates” exactly, but do provided verifiable proof of completion you can post to your LinkedIn or socials. (The real benefit is the knowledge you gain of course, but it’s nice to have some acknowledgment of what you’ve learned.)