Certifications are certainly no substitute for experience and competence but can help you get a foot in the door if you're just starting out. I've always been moderately skeptical of security certifications (CEH, CISSP, etc) as in my experience, they are more often than not a negative indicator of competence for anything beyond junior level.
Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
81–90 of 434 posts
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#82I 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…
A co-worker once told me he had two of three certifications for fireworks. I forget what they were exactly, maybe one for manufacturing, one for transportation, and one for operations.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#83Depends where you want to work. If you're looking to get into consulting, specifically related to vendors then it's a guarantee to win. Most vendors will require their authorised resellers/consultants to have a certain amount of certified staff. AWS comes to mind as the most obvious, but I'm sure this is the case with other cloud vendors.
For a "normal" business that is more of a customer to vendors, nah not really. Your experience is worth far more than your certifications. The only place it might get you somewhere is Government, although expectations are low there so you can get away with associate-level certifications and seem amazing.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#84Instructor training.
Learning to teach, forced me to learn how people learn and that was invaluable.
I have a certificate on how to teach sailing but never got a real job doing so, but the experience has applied to every job since.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#85An undergrad Computer Science degree and drivers license is pretty much the key.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#86Certificates say, I've read the manual. Solving the problem is much different.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#87RHCSA
Helped me get my first Systems Admin job
PS: I don't have a degree
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#88Amateur radio license. The experience is more relevant to my job than any corporate training I've ever done. Note that "experience" means "everything I've done with the license since getting the license". Don't fall into the "achievement" trap: reading a book so you can pass a multiple choice test teaches you precisely nothing, unless you go out and start to apply the rote memorization.
Interesting. What have you experienced with it since passing, and why is it relevant to your job?
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#89This will not apply to all companies, but for our hiring decisions certs have an adverse effect. If someone puts many certifications on their resume my expectations are lower and I likely won't consider them for interviews. It's a negative signal in my experience. Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff instead of wasting time on a…
I wouldn't dismiss certs that fast as from my experience hiring for technical roles, it's a wash. I've had people with more certs than braincells, and people with certs that I loved and wanted on my team immediately.
It at least gave me something to talk about more directly because I can have some expectation on tech they've worked with.
I personally don't chase certs for myself because I don't see the point, but I find them as fairly okay talking points on a CV. And it's hard to argue any interview unfairness since the cert should imply certain levels of familiarity with a technology.
Edit: I do need to add that the cert concern was a real thing in our company but after some analysis, we sadly found some biases from the interviewers as they only considered certs for certain candidates to be a negative signal. I put a stop to that fast reminding people of candidates from more western countries with gobs of certs, and they legit didn't know their ass from their head, much less how to do anything besides press the button the manual said to press.
Re: Ask HN: Any certification that is worth it? Legitimately helped your career?
#90IP6 certification! https://ipv6.he.net/certification/