There is no singular "get this proof and you'll be better off for it". You can get a cert that says you are the best at a thing in the world but without any app

There is no singular "get this proof and you'll be better off for it". You can get a cert that says you are the best at a thing in the world but without any applied experience it'll be hard to be valuable. The same goes for having a lot of experience 'doing stuff' but no common vocabulary or standards making collaboration really hard. If you have long-term experience and a base 'proof' of knowing how to work together, you have a solid foundation and everything else is just time and putting in the work (unless you want to get into some old boys network which isn't based on skills but on some form of heritage, be it family or a specific institute to attend). If you get some fundaments for compsci at any college and then work for 5 years going from application administration to system administration to cloud native development you'll have the same solid impression as starting at the helpdesk, getting an AWS cert and working your way up from junior AWS engineer to medior AWS engineer. Keep in mind that none of this gets you FAANG level work because they get a large enough pool of applicants where they can just filter anyone who doesn't have a combination of high grades and university or lots of experience in a highly specialised field. Besides that, like others wrote: "advertising" what certs you have collected is like advertising what Pokemon you collected.