In my previous posts, I covered the two primary benefits of certification pursuit and attainment:  having a structured learning path, and new opportunities.  Today, I’ll cover the more abstract benefits around personal growth.

Goal setting and focus

Working toward a certification requires the simple act of goal setting.  And working toward any significant goal brings a whole set of benefits.  When engaged in the pursuit of a goal, we exercise our ability to focus.  We set our eyes on the desired result and we engage our mind and actions on achieving that result.  That ability to focus, when exercised regularly, can have far reaching impacts on other areas of our lives.  This one skill can lead to better time management, setting priorities, and most importantly discipline. 

Discipline is required to achieve anything great.  When we establish disciplined habits on a daily basis, we experience the amazing compounding effect of consistent action.  This compounding effect can easily be seen in when applied to exercise and weight training, where each day’s workout builds on the gains achieved the day before.  Consistency is key, and consistency can only be achieved through disciplined effort.  James Clear’s book, “Atomic Habits”, provides an enlightening view on the power of consistent action. 

When applied to certification goals, we accept that consistent habits of study and practice are required.  The disciplined action of getting up early, for example, and studying daily establishes a routine that builds upon itself day after day.  Each day, we build upon the progress made the day before. One month of consistent studying or action puts us much further ahead than if we attacked it in an unorganized, random fashion.  Regular goal setting, discipline, and consistency, help to hone the skills of mental focus, time management, and priority setting.  The more we exercise these skills, the more natural they’ll become, and the more we’ll be able to accomplish. 

For me, the process of working toward any goal is incredibly satisfying.  I also happen to have a passion for learning, so when I tie the process of learning to a goal, such as achieving a certification, this becomes an incredibly enjoyable pursuit, which fuels the motivation to stay on track and stay disciplined.  The challenge then becomes time management.  But again, with disciplined habits, I can structure my day to ensure I have time to put in that consistent effort.  For example, I’m currently conditioning myself to get to sleep early at night, so I can get up early to study since I know the morning hours are the most effective time for me to accomplish my personal goals.

The act of the pursuit of a goal can be rewarding by itself, but the attainment of a goal brings another powerful benefit beyond increased skill or competence, and that is confidence.

Confidence

Achieving any goal can provide a healthy boost to one’s overall sense of confidence. The self-satisfaction and validation of one’s ability to accomplish a great task can be incredibly uplifting. When applied to the attainment of a certification, the attainment of new knowledge can lead to confidence in one’s grasp of the material. As stated in previous posts, gaining a certification does not equate to experience or similarly any level of mastery.  That can only be gained by years in the field or trenches.  But once a concept is learned, a new level of competence is gained.  What was once a mystery is now something understood, and grasping and understanding the new concept can translate into this renewed confidence.

I had a very eye-opening experience years ago when pursuing my CCNA certification.  Somehow, I made it through many years in IT without knowing the core networking concept of subnetting.  The logic was mysterious simply because I had not taken the time to understand it.  And having access to CIDR tables on the Internet didn’t help since this perpetuated my lack of need to learn it.  But subnetting is a core concept of the CCNA level material.  If you don’t grasp and internalize it, you won’t pass the exam.  Once I understood it, I was amazed how much that alone deepened my understanding of routing and switching.  It’s not surprising then how much of a confidence boost I felt in my approach to infrastructure engineering.

A few years ago, I attended a VCDX workshop led by Paul Mancuso.  He made one comment that stuck with me.  The gist of his comment was this:  Becoming a VCDX does not mean you will automatically make a lot more money, but you will treat your career differently.  What that comment meant to me was that this certification introduces a new level of confidence in one’s mastery over a particularly high-level skill set, and that this level of confidence could translate into one’s posture and the pursuit of higher level and more rewarding roles.  I honestly believe the attainment of any hard to achieve certification brings a confidence boost that can positively influence how we approach our current work and the type of future roles we pursue.  So many of us have dealt with imposter syndrome.  Sometimes the completion of a daunting certification might help provide some validation that we are not an imposter after all.

Enjoyment

The final thought on this has to do with simple enjoyment.  About 15 years ago, I thought about leaving the field of tech and pursing a completely different line of work.  I felt like I was “burnt out”.  I had been doing systems administration for several years, and I was looking for something more fulfilling.  Around this time, I got married and started feeling the pressure of supporting my family.  Instead of pursuing an entirely new career where income might be tight for a while, I made the decision to invest myself in my current career so that I could continue to pay the bills.  What happened was amazing.  By investing more of my time and focus in learning, I started receiving returns on my investment in the form of job satisfaction.  I started loving my work the more I learned.  It was within a year after that when I discovered virtualization, and that opened a whole new passion of mine for technology. 

Simply investing oneself and making the decision to own one’s career can truly open the door to a greater enjoyment and fulfillment that will fuel one’s career.  Certification pursuit and self-initiated learning is a powerful avenue for investing oneself and taking that ownership.

Conclusion

Over the last few posts, I’ve argued how certifications can be incredibly beneficial and highly rewarding for those with a craving for learning and growth in their careers.  They provide a structured path for learning a new technology or product, opened doors to new opportunities within one’s current role or a new role altogether, and personal growth and skills that can have a wide range of impact in one’s career.

The clear component that certification study misses of course is real-world production-level experience.  Working in a lab is not like working in a production environment.  Driving on a closed-course track is not like driving on the open road.  But how do we gain experience if it’s not part of our current role?  One answer is through project-based learning.  I’ll look forward to discussing that in an upcoming post.  Thanks for reading!

In my last post, I started a topic on the value of certifications, highlighting one of the strongest benefits of certification: structured learning path.  In this post, I’ll look at how the pursuit and attainment of certifications can open doors to new opportunities.

It’s widely believed that having a certification on one’s resume can get a foot in the door for an interview.  Recruiters and hiring managers often scan a candidate’s resume and the mere presence of a certification can certainly grab their attention.  Likewise having a certification listed on one’s LinkedIn profile can provide the right keywords when recruiters are scanning the site searching for potential candidates.

Of course, as mentioned in my previous post, having a certification doesn’t guarantee that one can do the work.  The technical interview in fact is designed to determine whether the candidate has enough technical depth to perform successfully in the role.  Experience will far more often provide that depth and is a better indicator of whether one can handle the workload.  That said, getting the interview is the first step, and sometimes simply having that certification can make the difference.

Additionally, some consulting companies and service providers search for candidates who have specific certifications to maintain vendor partnerships.  Having a consultant with these credentials can certainly help when bidding for new customer engagements, so these companies are motivated to find and keep individuals with existing certifications.

But what about your own company?  What opportunities can come up with your current employer?

Learning a new topic will never come back void.  For most managers, seeing one of their direct reports pursue a certification indicates a level of drive, self-initiative, and vision, especially when that pursuit was self-driven.  These are key traits for any manager to see in their employees and thus, managers will often reward those employees with new growth opportunities as they become available.

I’ve experienced this several time in my own career.  Pursuing VMware certifications early at my company showed my boss that I was serious about this new technology we had recently introduced to the organization.  Soon after, I found myself at VMworld for the first time, which by far opened my eyes to a whole new level of knowledge, enthusiasm, and a thriving community around this technology.  Without a doubt that made the largest shift in my own enthusiasm around the product and set me on a new course in my career.  It certainly cemented my position as the go-to VMware guy on my team.  When I think back, this was 2009 when the economy was still in a slump after the recession and most companies’ training budgets were trimmed back.  I believe that my certification was a contributing factor in the approval for me to attend the conference.

Another early example was my earning the ITIL Foundation certification a couple years later.  I had just taken on a management role on an operations team and I was searching for a good methodology for world class IT operations.  ITIL was exactly what I was looking for at the time.  I learned the lingo, read some books (including “The Visible Ops Handbook”, one of Gene Kim’s books before his “Phoenix Project” and DevOps fame), and I attained my certification.  I shared the news with my boss, who until that time had not known I was working on this, and he admired by pursuit and initiative.  Noting my initiative, he sent me to the upcoming Gartner Data Center Conference where I rubbed shoulders with other IT managers and influencers within the Infrastructure/Operations space.  And I had one-on-one meetings with Chris Wolf and George Spafford who both expanded my understanding of key areas in operations management.  All because I went after a certification.

More recently, I’ve displayed my interest in cloud service offerings, and I’ve focused my current learning pursuit on AWS.  My company, Syntax, is a managed cloud provider, offering services on-premises in our data centers as well as managing workloads and applications in the public cloud.  I happen to be on the on-premises team caring and feeding our large VMware environment, but some of my colleagues are working deep in AWS and Azure.  Since we partner with AWS and Microsoft, I knew it would provide value to add another certified AWS employee to our partnership. And by gaining an AWS certification, I also proved that I had the drive to learn and gain a proficiency in this service offering.  My boss has seen this drive and has sought out opportunities to provide me production experience working with our AWS team.

Those are a just a few examples from my own experience.  Sometimes the opportunities have been more subtle and sometimes they’ve led to other experiences that truly opened the door wide open.  I can honestly say, the attainment of a certification has never come back void from an opportunity standpoint.

For anyone serious about their career in technology, keeping a mind for learning is crucial.  One can certainly learn with no certifications attached.  But there is something tangible about a certification that shows a manager the level of focus and drive in your own career, as well as a competency that can most certainly translate into new opportunities that will provide experience and set you on a whole new path to growth.

In my next post, I’ll round out the topic of certifications by looking through the lens of personal growth. Stay tuned!

The value of tech certifications has been the topic of debate throughout my years in IT.  Many believe in the value and validation attained by them, while others view them as a cheap display of supposed knowledge, with no real skill or experience to back it up.  Some even go as far as viewing certifications as a money grab by their vendors.  I still remember the days of the early MCSE and the perceived promise of a better paying job, which made this a hugely popular cert and created what many would call “paper MCSEs”.  There was some truth behind this label since many were inexperienced or much worse, used brain dumps to get answers to questions before walking into the testing center.

I wholeheartedly agree that experience will always be worth more than the paper that comes with a passed exam.  I’ve been at the interview table with candidates who had a resume full of certifications but could not answer basic questions.  Likewise, some of the top talent we’ve had on our teams do not have some of the basic certifications.  That said, I am still a huge proponent of certifications as I see some key benefits that come through both the pursuit and attainment:

• Structured learning path
• Exposure to new opportunities
• Personal growth

Over the next several posts, I’ll lay out some of my thoughts around these benefits and ways that I have personally benefited through the attainment of certifications.

Structured learning path

First and foremost, I believe certifications provide a well-structured learning path.  Most vendors provide an exam blueprint for their respective exams, and even more training companies and publishers offer study guides and courses for exam preparation.  By using these study resources and exam blueprints, key topics are identified and a road map for studying is conveniently laid out.  To me this is one of the most efficient ways to quickly get up to speed on a particular technology.  This gives one the guidelines on what to study to gain the widest coverage of topics with just enough depth to gain a solid understanding of the product.

There are certainly many training resources available that are not exam-centric, yet provide a similar structured learning path.  But aiming for a certification provides an additional benefit: a deadline.  Having a deadline by scheduling an exam invariably increases motivation, which helps prioritize study time. And this provides a timeline that feeds nicely into those time-bound SMART goals.  By setting a time and priority to get up to speed on a topic, one can outline a schedule, and estimate the time required to attain a solid understanding of the topic.  For me personally, that helps me see the light at the end of the tunnel when tackling new material.

There have been several turning points in my own career when I identified an area of technology where I had a gap and I leveraged the power of certification study to fill that gap.  Notable examples have been networking, and more recently, AWS cloud.  In each of these areas, I was lacking critical knowledge or experience that I deemed essential to my own career progression.

In a previous job role, I worked as a consultant on customer projects.  I had a strong understanding in many areas in traditional infrastructure, but I was weak in my networking skills. Up to that point, even though I had managed a data center, I had relied heavily on network engineers on my team.  But in this consulting role, it seemed every project demanded some level of networking knowledge, and without my old colleagues to fall back on, I felt terribly handicapped.  Therefore, I set out to achieve my CCNA certification to gain a solid understanding of general Layer 2/3 concepts and router/switch configuration so I could do my job.  And by doing so, my understanding was greatly enhanced, which helped my overall design and engineering skills.  I was able to at last fill out the entire infrastructure stack and become a much better engineer.  To this day, I credit my pursuit of this one certification as being a key turning point in my career. There aren’t many days that go by when I don’t employ some knowledge gained during this pursuit.  In fact, I’m amazed I got so far in my career without this skill set.  (psst… I think I really was an impostor. 😊 )

This year, I’ve focused on public cloud and decided to work on my AWS certifications to get up to speed on this fast growing technology. My company partners with AWS as part of our offerings, but I happen to spend most of my time on our on-prem managed hosting services, managing our large VMware environment. Earlier this year, I attained my AWS Solutions Architect Associate certification and I’m currently working on my Developer Associate cert. The latter has been especially helpful, not just for my understanding of new cloud services, but also in getting my mind wrapped around the developer mindset. I’ve been a solid infrastructure guy throughout my career and it’s just been within the last several years that scripting and coding have taken center stage for me. The leap into dev tools and understanding the way developers approach cloud services is a major step in my evolution as an IT professional.

In areas where I already feel fairly skilled, I’ve still used certifications to help fill gaps in my understanding of a product.  I consider myself strongly proficient in VMware vSphere having spent over 12 years deep in the trenches designing and administering enterprise scale VMware environments.  But there are still many components within vCenter or ESXi that I don’t use on a day-to-day basis.  Pursuing VMware certs has helped fill some of those gaps by motivating me to study these lesser used aspects of the product.  This was particularly true when I pursued and attained the advanced level VCAP certifications.  For anyone who has taken these certifications can attest, “book” knowledge is not enough to pass those exams.  Real world experience is essential.  But by pursuing those certifications, deeper level concepts were uncovered and thus, my own understanding was increased.  Having this deeper level understanding greatly enhanced even my day-to-day tasks as my horizon and visibility into the product was expanded.

There are clearly other structured ways to learn new concepts.  Besides cold, hard experience, project-based learning and deliberate practice are incredibly strong avenues for learning, as they clearly provide an even deeper level of understanding and skill.  If one truly wants to master a technology, those strategies are integral to the process. I plan to write about this in upcoming posts, but the purpose here has been to consider how certifications in particular still provide value in the overall plan for learning and growth.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share two other benefits of the certification game: exposure to new opportunities and personal growth. Stay tuned!