I am relatively new to the world of vendor-specific certifications. For those of you who have explored them, what are your thoughts on them? Are they worth the studying and the ~ US $100 to take the examinations?
I agree with j, to a certain extent. Certificates can be written on toilet paper these days, and don't really prove much other than the recipients fundamental understanding of what they've been certified for. It also has its limits, especially in this current industry where things change much too often. There's also a chance, like for server administration, where you'll need to re-test every so often to have an up-to-date and valid certification.
In my experience, caring about a potential developer having a type of certification is a huge mistake and - more often than not - results in toxic work environments. You need to be able to perpetually learn and grow with your colleagues, because much like college degrees, your skill set will eventually become antiquated and you've leaned on those pseudo-intellectual qualifications for your entire career without properly evolving.
Well the point of certificates is that you don't have to prove your knowledge anymore. So it will open doors.
One of my oldest friends has a lot of those certificates and he gets picked for some bigger companies because of those certificates.
I can only talk about the CCNA: it was quite good, zend was also quite interessting. I actually should do more of them :D
There are 2 related but different questions here: are they worth it, and have any jobs we applied for cared about it.
I do have 2 AWS certifications. I’m not sure how much they cared, but it made things easier for sure (as j pointed out, it’s like when a company has some ISO/SOC compliance certification: it assesses some foundations so the time checking these parts is really reduced, if not completely removed)
For the other parts: are they worth it. This is more a personal feeling, but I still believe yet it was. In a nutshell, cloud vendors offering are so huge right now that one always focuses only on very few parts, the one they use on a daily basis. Studying for the cert exams forced me to do 2 things:
I wrote a much longer post about this shortly after I passed my second AWS certification medium.com/@sportebois/preparing-to-pass-an-aws-c…
Approx two years later I still believe it.
Another interesting question could be: Is it the best use of your learning budget (both $ and time)? and I might not be positive here. Studying for certs is a big-time commitment for "just" this, and carefully investing this time on other resources could have a bigger impact. But like any exam, the cert forces you to study continuously before the exam, whereas cherry-picking things here and there might make it more difficult to study with the same commitment level.