12 months, 12 IT certifications: the roadmap to improve your professional career
In this post we pursue a twofold objective, initially describing the context surrounding certifications, followed by a selection classified by topic.
I would like to share my conclusions, my experience in preparing for various certification exams and that it can serve as a guide to others, especially to estimate realistic efforts and to be able to orient themselves.
It is a challenging planning for a year, to be able to prepare it, it will require full dedication, as well as a budget allocated for this purpose. I leave this analysis in the hands of the reader, who knows better than anyone else his or her circumstances, will, time and effort that can be dedicated to it.
Do certifications really serve a purpose?
My main impression is that yes, certifications have had a positive impact on my professional career. To give a few examples, they have helped me to argue for role changes, to open up possibilities with new training, and have even allowed me to explore other professional areas. So I like certifications, although like everything else, they have their pros and cons. On the one hand, they have a certain halo of officialdom, as they are backed by entities of recognized prestige, or by the authors of a technology themselves, accrediting a more or less in-depth knowledge of it.
However, on the other hand, they are still a business that expands the service portfolio of companies. Not surprisingly, many of the certifications must be renewed every 2 or 3 years. There is also some confusion in the term certification as some MooC platforms use it for certificates of completion and use a common platform in social networks such as LinkedIn.
For the purposes of this article we will refer exclusively to certification exams whose passing implies obtaining a license or badge that accredits you with a more or less limited duration (there are exceptions). In addition, they usually have an identification number verifiable by third parties through public means.
Despite all this, they are gradually infiltrating job offers, the objectives and career plans of employees in companies, and even the benefits complementary to salary.
The world of technical certifications
In the previous analysis, we have highlighted that there is a certain relationship between companies that set up a training and certification circuit that works and the compensation they receive in the form of community, engagement and direct value. Logically, this is a self-interested relationship; a large community of users will have a positive impact on the growth of your product or service, and the longer it lasts.
The question to be addressed in this section is focused on how the ecosystem around certifications has been structured. If we consider their proximity to the certification program, as well as their quality and usually cost, we could establish a cataloging as proposed below:
- Primary market: Managed by the promoting companies, large training firms and those with a framework agreement (partnership) to provide training with official resources.
- Secondary market: Entities such as academies and parallel platforms, arising from the heat of interest in a certification or a set of technologies. Normally, when a team of teachers achieves sufficient interest, it positions itself as a benchmark for the quality of its materials and is able to take the step and establish its own brand.
- Tertiary market: Very targeted and incipient training resources, such as tailor-made courses for a single exam, collections of solved exams, mobile apps that guarantee a pass, etc.
The economic cost is decreasing with respect to the order presented. Although there are exceptions such as providers that eventually deliver discounts or open trainings, promotions to finance exam fees, etc. In general, the more official the exam, the higher the cost. It is often compulsory to purchase training service packages as a means of access to the exam.
As far as possible, we will always recommend the first two, however, taking batteries of exams can be very beneficial to know the depth and typology of the questions, but always with a previous preparation and never as the only study method.
Roadmap for one year (premium version)
Below is a list of certifications, the common thread of all of them are the areas of study and knowledge that a professional of new technologies should know in some depth. Starting from how to relate to the people in your team in the context of agile methodologies to the most advanced tools to design robust, scalable and secure solutions.
It is a technical path, closely linked to development and technology. Its interest is to orient the professional career to a global vision of software development in the cloud, but without losing sight of the fundamentals of it. The selection of topics follows a holistic design, which allows to guide the developments with the greatest efficiency and the least possible complexity. There could have been other certifications chosen, the level or depth of them, however, I am not inclined to change the orientation of the list.
- Enero: Agile for developers with:
Professional Scrum Developer™ Certification - Febrary: Introduction to Linux with Linux Professional Institute (LPIC-1)
- March: Introduction to Web Development with MTA: HTML5 Application Development Fundamentals
- April: Backend services with Node.js OpenJS Node.js Services Developer (JSNSD)
- May: Python development throught Certified Associate in Python Programming certification (PCAP)
- June: Microservices & Kubernetes with Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
- July: DevOps: Infrastructure as Code with HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
- August: Introduction to automated testing with ISTQB Foundation Level software testing certification (CTFL)
- September: First steps at cloud development with AWS Certified Developer — Associate or Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate or Google Associate Cloud Engineer
- Octuber: Data Visualization applied with Tableau Desktop Specialist
- November: AI Introduction with Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals
- December: NoSQLs Databases as MongoDB Certified Developer, Associate Level C100DEV or Neo4j Professional Certified Developer
- Bonus Track: Cybersecurity basics with Cybersecurity Fundamentals (CSX)
Roadmap for one year (open source version)
As a completely alternative learning path I am happy to recommend the platform: Learn to Code for Free, which has at the time of writing these lines, 10 completely free certifications that are obtained through an estimated dedication of 300 hours for each of them. The positive thing, in addition to the lack of economic cost, is the constant updating of content, its newsletter and its breadth.
Below we propose an order, slightly different from that proposed by the authors, which seeks to organize in two large blocks of FullStack programming and data science.
- Responsive Web Design Certification
- JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification
- Front End Libraries Certification
- APIs and Microservices Certification
- Quality Assurance Certification
- Information Security Certification
- Data Visualization Certification
- Scientific Computing with Python Certification
- Data Analysis with Python Certification
- Machine Learning with Python Certification
I am currently taking some of these trainings, so we will try to publish more detailed information in the near future.
Some practical tips for preparing for certification exams
To conclude the post, I think the best advice I can give in good conscience for preparing for an exam is to dedicate enough time and interest to it. We can go over various tricks such as claiming that it is a language we are not native in to gain a few extra minutes, doing a lot of mock exams… but in reality these are just patches.
The key is to take it seriously, spend some time reading the exam documentation (syllabus, test questions, policy, methodology) before even thinking about buying a reservation. Search on specialized internet forums or through fellow professionals for impressions of the exam, and see if it really fills a gap we may have in our preparation, or brings us closer to a bigger goal.
On the day of the exam, I like to use the resource of marking questions for later review. This tool, very frequent in the exam platforms and will help us to go faster towards a first pass of the exam, which in the end is an efficient time management. In addition, exams often include among the questions themselves useful information for answering other questions. This is because rarely an exam is composed only by the questions that are presented to us, usually, they are a larger quota and logically the syllabus is the same and is written by different people, so that colliding in the topics is very frequent.
Originally published in https://keepler.io on February 2, 2021.
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