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This is a fantastic initiative, like the Career Certificates Google announced lately [1]. I do wonder why Amazon didn’t partner with Coursera, EdX or similar to

This is a fantastic initiative, like the Career Certificates Google announced lately [1]. I do wonder why Amazon didn’t partner with Coursera, EdX or similar to offer certification along with the knowledge. Anything that makes learning more legible is to Amazon’s benefit as a giant hiring machine limited by the attention of technical talent. If they offered certs they could (perhaps) allow the holders to skip one stage of interviews, like a phone screen, or even just automatically allow them access to Amazon’s coding screen like Hacker Rank. [1] https://grow.google/certificates/ https://grow.google/certificates/

scarface74 6y ago
If they offered certs they could (perhaps) allow the holders to skip one stage of interviews For all that is holy I hope not - speaking as a consultant who works at AWS. I held a number of AWS certifications before being hired. I used them mostly as a guided learning path to help me know what I didn’t know. I also had “enough” real world experience as both a developer and working with AWS’s fiddly bits to be useful relatively quickly when I started working here. I saw far too many “paper tigers” when I was in the real world who have all of the certifications you could imagine but couldn’t pass my relatively simple tech screen when I was hiring operations people to take some of the load off of me so I could concentrate on some development projects. Certifications in no way prove competency.
PaulRobinson 6y ago
While about 1/3rd of the phone screen covers technical topics, quite a lot of it is “behavioural questioning” to see how well your experience aligns with Amazon’s leadership principles (ignore the “leadership” name, they apply to everybody). Same with the rest of the process, so I’m not sure how much a cert would take off to be honest. I think there is value in certification anyway, as per the AWS certs, but not as a “let’s skip part of the hiring process”, maybe just edges you on the CV screen perhaps.
tehgoodplace 6y ago
>I do wonder why Amazon didn’t partner with Coursera, EdX or similar to offer certification along with the knowledge. See here for a different program with Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/scholarships/aws-machine-learning-scholarship-program https://www.udacity.com/scholarships/aws-machine-learning-sc...

scarface74 6y ago

If they offered certs they could (perhaps) allow the holders to skip one stage of interviews For all that is holy I hope not - speaking as a consultant who works at AWS. I held a number of AWS certifications before being hired. I used them mostly as a guided learning path to help me know what I didn’t know. I also had “enough” real world experience as both a developer and working with AWS’s fiddly bits to be useful relatively quickly when I started working here. I saw far too many “paper tigers” when I was in the real world who have all of the certifications you could imagine but couldn’t pass my relatively simple tech screen when I was hiring operations people to take some of the load off of me so I could concentrate on some development projects. Certifications in no way prove competency.

PaulRobinson 6y ago

While about 1/3rd of the phone screen covers technical topics, quite a lot of it is “behavioural questioning” to see how well your experience aligns with Amazon’s leadership principles (ignore the “leadership” name, they apply to everybody). Same with the rest of the process, so I’m not sure how much a cert would take off to be honest. I think there is value in certification anyway, as per the AWS certs, but not as a “let’s skip part of the hiring process”, maybe just edges you on the CV screen perhaps.

tehgoodplace 6y ago

>I do wonder why Amazon didn’t partner with Coursera, EdX or similar to offer certification along with the knowledge. See here for a different program with Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/scholarships/aws-machine-learning-scholarship-program https://www.udacity.com/scholarships/aws-machine-learning-sc...