Sure, but who are you standing out from? Do you want to optimize your career to stand out from those candidates, or from the person you've optimized yourself to

Sure, but who are you standing out from? Do you want to optimize your career to stand out from those candidates, or from the person you've optimized yourself to be currently? Stated another way, getting a bunch of certifications helps you stand out from the entry level. Putting aside a platonic ideal of what certifications should be, you could have done that without those certifications. With regards to your first paragraph - at this point my consultancy bills five figures per week, and I do absolutely no outbound lead gen. The lack of certifications will lose you business, yes. But I would argue that was not necessarily business you wanted to optimize for.