Ranking My 28 Tech Certifications
And why I'm quitting certifications...
In 2024, I felt that my career in software engineering had plateaued. I knew I needed to upskill, but I wasn’t sure what the next step should be. Rather than guessing, I decided to make a deliberate “career bet”: to form a clear thesis about career development, execute on it fully, and then reevaluate.
My bet was that technical certifications were being undervalued by engineering audiences. I believed they could serve as a curated curriculum designed by subject-matter experts—and that their built-in gamification would provide enough motivation to see the process through. Based on this thesis, I gradually assembled a 28-certification roadmap, which I completed over the course of ten months.
The results were tangible. I ended the year with a stronger sense of agency over both my career and my day-to-day work. The projects I delivered produced durable abstractions that reduced complexity and compounded progress, rather than creating work that needed to be revisited later.
Tier List
Ranking Criteria
I’m ranking these certifications based on:
Usefulness
Relevance to a cloud/platform engineering career
Engineering concepts that generalize beyond the certification vendor
S-Tier - Amazing! Must do
Linux Foundation Certified Systems Administrator (LFCS)
Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
AWS Solutions Architect Professional (SAP)
HashiCorp TerraForm Associate
HashiCorp TerraForm Authoring & Operations Professional
HashiCorp Vault Operations Professional
These are the certifications I would recommend any junior or mid-career software engineer to do at least once.
LFCS gives you a rigorous practical introduction to the world’s most important OS. CKAD unlocks container orchestration superpowers in a cloud-agnostic way. Together these are the two most important OSS projects in the world.
I wanted to highlight a cloud service provider (CSP), and in my experience AWS still has the best CSP certification ecosystem, with SAP being a pretty challenging technical bar to clear. I feel my cloud architectural instincts greatly improved thanks to this test.
HashiCorp makes a big showing here, and for good reason. TerraForm Associate completely rewired my mind to never provision cloud resources with ClickOps. TerraForm Pro then helps you graduate from bad Infrastructure-as-Code to scalable abstractions that follow best practices. Vault Pro shows you how to treat security as a first-class concern with flexible secrets engines and many integrations.
A-Tier - Very strong additions. Recommended
Azure Solutions Architect Expert
Azure Administrator Associate
GCP Professional Cloud Architect (PCA)
Nvidia AI Networking Professional (NCP-AIN)
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
HashiCorp Vault Associate
I’ll say these certifications are strong overall, but aren’t revolutionary. There’s still a ton of yield here, so I’d only recommend skipping if you have strong reasons to deviate.
Azure Certifications were a bit confusing because the Administrator Associate exam was far harder than the Solutions Architect Expert Exam. Because Administrator Associate tends to ask obscure implementation questions, I actually thought I badly failed Administrator Associate exam, but ended up passing with a comfortable margin.
Meanwhile, GCP’s PCA was the least demanding of the CSP exams, but I decided to keep it in A Tier because they are very good about teaching engineering concepts outside of the GCP ecosystem - such as strong vs. eventual consistency when architecting applications. If GCP chose to raise the difficulty of PCA, this would be a contender for S tier.
NCP-AIN taught me to think about high performance networking, which isn’t typically covered in traditional tech certifications. You’ll learn about concepts like InfiniBand, RoCE, RDMA, DPU’s, and Cumulus Linux. It’s quite difficult to go straight into NCP-AIN without previously going through NCP-AII or NCP-AIO, so you may want to treat those as prerequisite.
Both CKA and CKS add valuable Kubernetes knowledge for managing control planes and security safety, but aren’t in S tier because you already get most of the value of container orchestration from CKAD. However I still recommend doing all three because CNCF is pretty good about not repeating content.
Vault Associate is still strong, but less useful because I don’t think you can get much practical use out of it with only associate level depth.
B-Tier - Pretty good, but not as urgent
Nvidia AI Infrastructure & Operations Associate (NCA-AIIO)
Nvidia AI Operations Professional (NCP-AIO)
Cilium Certified Associate (CCA)
Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)
OpenTelemetry Certified Associate (OTCA)
Certified Argo Projects Associate (CAPA)
Istio Certified Associate (ICA)
AWS DevOps Professional (DOP)
This is the tier of certifications that add value, but are skippable if you’re not looking to spend money on JPEG’s to validate your progress.
NCA-AIIO is the “gateway drug” to Nvidia tooling. The whole thing reads more like an ad rather than a certification, but given how complex its ecosystem of services has gotten with recent acquisitions, I can forgive it. I will say though that Nvidia needs to work on their presentation because at some points I felt like I was listening to an AI-generated cult recruiting meeting with quotes from the dear leader Jensen Huang. NCP-AIO is better on the technical rigor, but it is so focused on expensive licensed Nvidia software (Base Command Manager) that I have a hard time recommending it to certification pursuers. Still, I’m happy that it taught me the basics of Slurm. (a job scheduler for HPC/AI)
CCA is my favorite associate-level certification from the CNCF ecosystem because it teaches about eBPF fundamentals rather than just Cilium implementation details. CAPA is important for beginners because it builds a habit to think in GitOps rather than imperative approaches. PCA and OpenTelemetry are cornerstones of the observability world, so they are useful in diverse situations, but because they were so easy, the shelf life of this knowledge is short.
Expect CNCF associate certifications to be pretty easy though. Many of them I was able to study for in a single day. Their intention seems to be teaching you to instinctively reach for the correct tool for the job, rather than teaching you how to use the respective project. The one exception to this rule is ICA which is unexpectedly a practical exam, not multiple choice. This exam was difficult and the content was practical but its ranked lower because I think service meshes are not as important as cloud architecture or Kubernetes fundamentals.
AWS DevOps Pro was far less useful than I initially imagined it to be. This is because the AWS-specific tooling for automation, configuration, and observability tends to be crowded out by OSS alternatives (Ansible, Packer) or dedicated services that treat these topics as first-class concerns (CircleCI, Grafana). I will say I don’t think this is necessarily the fault of AWS, but rather an organic outcome when AWS has over 200 services fighting for your attention. Everything seems to work well enough but not optimally because you were never presented with a point of friction that caused you to create an intentional strategy to observability, configuration, or some other class of tooling.
C-Tier - Probably Skip
Nvidia AI Infrastructure Professional (NCP-AII)
Certified GitOps Associate (CGOA)
Kyverno Certified Associate (KCA)
HashiCorp Consul Associate
I would say to skip these unless you have a particular interest in them or need them for Golden Kubestronaut. They aren’t especially urgent and many of them aren’t deep enough to be useful.
The main flaw with NCP-AII is that so much of the content is going to be irrelevant unless you are physically inside a data center and administering very expensive Nvidia equipment. Presumably if you are in that situation already, then you don’t need this certification, so I wondered who is the target audience for this certification. Having said that, some included content is very important such as MIG partitioning and device troubleshooting, but for cloud/platform engineering roles there is a low signal/noise ratio in this cert.
GitOps is an important paradigm to understand, and CGOA is a cute little intro to GitOps as a discipline, but seems unnecessary. The whole thing has major “this could have been an email” energy. I’d encourage people to do some light reading & note taking on this instead.
KCA introduces the Kyerno policy agent allowing you to define what configurations you want deployable within your clusters. Policy enforcement tends to be useful in large scale orgs where entropy would otherwise win, but the certification is clearly targeting entry level candidates. I’m not sure which target audience is supposed find value in the Kyverno project and also find this cert informative. The overlap seems slim.
Consul Associate was my introduction to service meshes. As opposed to other meshes, it is ideal for heterogeneous workloads spanning many data centers. I’m ranking Consul low because: 1. Consul has a more niche use-case relative to other service meshes, so it’s going to be difficult to apply 2. By the time I finished the Consul Associate certification, I had a broad idea of how Consul works but I wouldn’t yet be able to operate a Consul mesh. Working experience counts for a lot after this cert.
F-Tier - Not useful
Certified Backstage Associate (CBA)
Kubernetes & Cloud Native Associate (KCNA)
Kubernetes & Cloud Native Security Associate (KCSA)
I’m gonna be honest here, I passed CBA without even knowing how Backstage works… I made a study guide based on the exam blueprint, and after I studied I was able to pass the exam, but so much of the content felt completely unrelated to Internal Developer Portals (IDP). Much of it was React knowledge, so I simply relied on my React experience to get through it. I’ll say it’s definitely a goal of mine to revisit Backstage in the future, but as for the CBA - skip it. Instead try to learn Backstage through projects.
KCNA and KCSA are similar “Intro to Kubernetes” certs and I wouldn’t recommend these because I think someone should go straight to CKAD → CKA → CKS. The only time I’ve heard of people doing these is if they want Kubestronaut status.
Certification Anti-Patterns
Sin #1: Absence of a Comprehensive Strategy
For certifications to have the best effect, they should be a part of an intentional strategic bet that you are making. Becoming qualified for a role typically takes several months or years, so if you can’t make a strategy that you stick to, then you’ll drift before you fulfill all the role qualifications.
Sin #2: Distractions in the form of completionism and badge-collecting
Many people pursue certifications seemingly thinking that raw quantity is a viable strategy. I’ve never been of the opinion that collecting all the AWS certifications is an efficient use of time, nor do I imagine anyone inside AWS would seriously recommend this. I do think that this becomes the default path for many people though because AWS is such a popular entry point to certifying. There’s a lot of people with that completionism itch for other cert vendors as well.
Instead, I encourage you to define upfront which certifications are enough for you, complete them, and move on.
Sin #3: Taking career advice from anonymous experts
You don’t have to venture far online to hear a lot of hot takes regarding certifications. Many people think they are money-grabs, others think they simply don’t impress hiring managers. Sometimes these critiques are valid, but I would caution anyone from taking them too seriously. Much of these critiques are so fervent because people have unrealistic expectations of what value a certification should deliver.
“Just get this one cert and you’ll have a six-figure career in tech” was never a realistic expectation. Instead certifications often fill out some necessary conditions to employment, but aren’t sufficient on their own. This is why having a comprehensive strategy is so important in the first place. Ideally you pick a target specialization, define a backlog of skills you need to learn, then gain those skills over several months.
Why I’m Quitting Certifications
This strategic bet paid off quite well for me. At the very least, I’ve become a keyword magnet for LinkedIn and ATS filters. However I feel I already explored the high-yield blind spots I once had. I don’t expect to have any more eureka moments from certifications, so my focus is shifting towards engineering with the tools that I learned in this process. Personally I find studying for certifications to be much less enjoyable compared to actually engineering.
Acknowledgements
Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You was a helpful resource to give language to many of the intuitions I was experiencing, including the concept of “strategic bets” and the “artisan mindset”.
I’d like to thank the following smart people for study materials: Adrian Cantril (AWS), Bryan Krausen (Vault), Zeal Vora (Kubernetes, TerraForm, Vault, Consul), Jeremy Morgan (Linux), Mumshad Mannambeth (Kubernetes), Rithin Skaria (Azure)