The kind of company that values certifications highly is not the kind of company you want to work for.
Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
21–30 of 434 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#22As an employer in the cyber security domain I don't have many methods of evaluating a candidate practical knowledge. For this reason I take a look at their certifications and will generally be very happy to see an OSCP or other offensive security certifications.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#23One orbit of Saturn ago, achieving an Oracle OCP opened doors for me and let me charge big bucks during the dot-com boom.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#24Not sure if it's what you mean but graduating from a good uni seems to make a difference to people. I went to Cambridge and people always treat you a bit different when you say. Though it's more having gone than what you studied. Even if you are too late for undergrad you can always potentially do a masters at some high ranking place.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#25For testers I found that ISTQB is really valuable. The lack of graduate programs for this field + the fact that's not easy to get make it even more important.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#26Back in 1998 or 2000 (I don't remember the exact year), I did RHCE and IT networking certificate. It landed my first corporate gig as I was the only person who knew Linux. In addition, I was the first hire who started replacing traditional Unix servers with RHEL. So, yes, it did help me despite not having a college degree. I am very thankful to Linux and FLOSS for paying all my bills over the years.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#27Honestly I do not do certs to help my career.
I find product / vendor based certification helps me round out my knowledge of a product better than just execution of a given task I need done at the time. This has helped me understand more of the capabilities of the what I wanted to learn
IMO this is more were the value of certs come in.
So for example I would not get a AWS Cert to get a Job in Cloud Administration, I would start training learning the cert to understand AWS, the cert is then just the final step of the learning process, the reward if you will.
Do I need to cert to learn it, no and sometimes I do not actually sit for the test.
I think people that just brain dump to pass the exam do themselves a disservice, that said the short answer to your question, I can not think of any cert that by virtue of just having it has advanced my career, I can say the process of getting certs which resulted in my expanded knowledge and experience has
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#28Fair or not, if someone has flooded their email signature with certs, my expectations lower.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#29Not sure if it's what you mean but graduating from a good uni seems to make a difference to people. I went to Cambridge and people always treat you a bit different when you say. Though it's more having gone than what you studied. Even if you are too late for undergrad you can always potentially do a masters at some high ranking place.
My experience is once you've got your foot in the door at a company nobody is interested in your university background. Perhaps it's different if you have a higher qualification like a doctorate.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#30I collect a lot of certs for fun, but most have not been helpful. I still like to collect them anyway. I think OSCP was the most legitimately useful in tech https://www.offensive-security.com/pwk-oscp/ PMP has been useful to take on Project Manager roles, but really PrM roles aren't all that exciting to begin with. Still helps when you want to run your own projects. I'm currently studying to be a certified parliament…
Study almond growing to become certifiably nuts.