A colleague from work asked me the other day:

Marcos, I was thinking to take an AWS certification. What you would recommend me?

What I’m going to tell you in this email is the summary I gave to this person.

As happens on many occasions, it depends. You are lucky because I can give for first-hand advice based on what you really want to achieve.

In today’s email, I provide a guideline to help you determine if you need to pursue the certification you have in mind or if you just need something else.

In my personal experience, I got the CDAK training from the Linux Foundation, and they were good in general. Part of it that training was the “Containers Fundamentals Course”, for which I wrote an email about this. You can read it down here 👇🏻

But I did not jump into the certification exam. Why? Because my goal was knowledge, not the certificate. I’ve been working with Kubernetes for the last 10 years, which has helped me reach where I wanted to go.

☝🏼 Here is the important part of today’s email:

If your goal is to become an expert, just learn as much as you can and work on that on a daily basis.
If the certificate will give you some benefit, like a promotion, job position, or similar, then go for the certification.

So, ask yourself at this point:

What I really want?

From there, I give you 2 paths.

🧘🏽 The Expert Path

If you like technology and what you want to do is become an expert, I have some news for you:

👉🏼 You don’t need to pass the certificate exam to become an expert in a technology; what you need is:

Knowledge.
Practice.

Those 2 points, ideally, in parallel.

The knowledge you can get through:

Official/unofficial trainings.
Technical mentoring from a peer.
Working every single day with that technology.

The best experts I found in my career (on AWS or Kubernetes) worked every day on the technology for 2 or 3 years.

Did you expect something more complex than that?

💮 The Certificate Path

The certificate gives you a paper that helps others to target you as an expert in a field. From there, you have to perform based on the level of expertise expected, based on the paper.

👉🏼 Preparing for the certification exam is not exactly about getting the knowledge about the technology. And this is an important difference. Preparing for a certification exam means:

Of course, you have learn something about the technology during the official (and not official) trainings.
But the most important part is practice with real exams.

That’s the thing you should focus on if your choice is the certification exam.

Will the preparation for the certification exam give me knowledge? Yes, but for sure not to be an expert, because (let’s be realistic) you focus on passing the exam only.

In my case, I took training on AWS and Kubernetes. In case you want to know some important trainings I got and that helped me to level up in my knowledge and career in the technical path, reply to this email or drop me a new one 👇🏻