The primary purpose for most certificates is to get past the HR droid that is filtering applications. Beyond that, I find that most certificates don’t have a l

The primary purpose for most certificates is to get past the HR droid that is filtering applications. Beyond that, I find that most certificates don’t have a lot of value. Perhaps that you’re willing to put in a certain amount of work and pain to achieve a piece of paper, maybe. There are some certificates that mean you actually know something — Netware, Cisco, etc…. Some of the AWS certificates mean something, but that’s limited to the higher level Professional certificates. The Associate level certificates mean that you’ve memorized a few buzzwords, and not much more. You need to go beyond the Associate level to get to the ones that are actually meaningful. Note that I say this as a person who recently obtained the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certificate, which is a level below the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate cert, but that will be the next one I work on. I’ll start by taking some practice tests to see where I might need some fill-in training, but then I’ll probably just launch into the actual test.