25 IT Certifications, a Retrospective

I have between 19 and 25 IT certifications at the time of writing, depending how you count them.

It’s been something that I do to prove my competence over a technology, and earn college credit, when I was a student.

I still do them, even though I desire a higher level of knowledge than the certifications offer.

I do them now to prove I have competence over something technical so that employers to give me a chance, rather than to learn because many of the certifications share exam objectives, and the concepts I need to learn across venders are often exactly the same and can be learned on the fly.

It’s possible the industry could move away from certifications in the future to some kind of test that measures problem solving skills or vendor neutral tech knowledge because technology has become so abstracted and easy to use that memorizing tons of vendor specific concepts is a rather inefficient way to learn, because it’s so easy to pick up the concepts on the fly, and because AI can assist IT work which greatly simplifies it.

However, what certifications do show is that a person is a go getter, is willing to do continual learning, has up to date knowledge, and is a hard worker, as any certification is a large undertaking.

Those things I listed aren’t what the certifications are being used for by HR and hiring managers, similar to the market for software engineers, employers want IT workers who have specific knowledge in specific technologies, even if this isn’t really required to do the job effectively.

Certifications serve this aim somewhat well, as they are tests which test the technical knowledge of a technology that a candidate knows but they are inefficient due to the wasted time having to study by the worker.

I suspect the particularness of HR and hiring managers is that there is a large amount of dud employees in technology, which have burned many employers in the past, making them vary wary of who they hire as well as the ballooning of the workforce during COVID, which has subsequently been laid off.

These two causes could also be connected.

My purpose in doing certifications is to convince an employer to give me a shot, because once they allow me to do the work it’s quite simple stuff in my experience.

Now, I’ll talk about my journey from the start.

I started earning certifications at Northern Virginia Community College, where I was a student in their Information Systems Technology program.

This came about by hearing that the college would pay the fee for your certification test if you got an A or a B.

I had a friend named Josh in one of my classes who knew a lot about computer hardware, and I asked him what he thought about myself doing Network+.

Josh told me that he had failed it twice and he didn’t think it was possible to pass without a lot of experience.

This making me really angry and I felt a fire in me to study and pass to prove him wrong.

This was a really good turn of events looking back as it tied by social standing to passing, which motivated me to do the work and study.

After the semester ended, I applied for a voucher for Network+ and started studying in December of 2022.

I did about 4-8 hours a day I believe, and I used Professor Messer for Network+.

Around January 1, I was ready for the exam, but no voucher.

So, I just bought a voucher rather than waiting rather than waste time.

Surprisingly, I passed.

I was in an online group of students hosted by a professor at the college, and when I told them I passed Network+, I received a lot of positive encouragement, and this was the first time in my life I felt like I really accomplished something difficult even though in the past I was a varsity athlete for track and field and cross country and had won a lot of awards in high school for academics.

Network+ was something I earned, not something that just fell into my lap without trying, and it was the first thing I was congratulated by my peers by in any significant way.

The combination of me wanting to prove myself to the other students and praise when I passed was a powerful combo moving me forward.

I then moved onto A+ and passed core 1 and core 2 by the end of January 2023.

Rinse and repeat, praise for passing and a feeling of accomplishment as well as college credit.

I carefully worked out what classes I needed to take and what classes I could do by passing a certification by spending too much time on my college's website.

Over the next few months, I finally got my free voucher for Linux+, passing by 10 points, and then passing AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, Security+, and AWS Solutions Architect Associates.

By doing the AWS certs as well as one extra class, I was able to earn a second associate degree in Cloud Computing.

The other certs were able to shorten my time in school by 1 semester for my information systems degree and by 2 semesters for the cloud computing degree.

After graduating in August 2023, I looked for a job.

I was very pessimistic about the job hunt, knowing about the large amounts of layoffs that had happened earlier that year, including the infamous 10k layoffs at the major tech companies.

I decided to just shoot my shot and start applying.

I applied for about 30 jobs and got an interview at Technica Corporation.

It was a three-round interview, one with the recruiter, then the hiring manager, then the hiring manager and his director.

Ultimately, I passed, and I started working as a systems administrator.

A month or two after starting, I asked my boss why he hired me, and he noted the certifications I had earned while a student as a primary motivation, as well as my positive attitude.

Around that time, my boss asked me to become knowledgeable in the company's firewall, a Palo Alto networks firewall.

I decided to do the PCNSA certification as a way to get a handle on it.

After about 1 month of studying, I passed, and while I had some experience working with the firewall before this I think, the real work would begin after I had gotten my certification.

I became the expert on the firewall over the next few months, as Technica is mainly a Juniper shop and most of the other employees are Juniper SMEs.

Sometimes my coworkers would call me “The Palo Alto man.”

Soon, the need to learn Microsoft, especially Microsoft 365 would arise as the company moved away from on prem Active Directory to become a fully Microsoft Intune managed company.

Over the next few months, I did MS 900, AZ 900, and I did a bunch of the applied skills tests, which I found quite fun as well as free.

The need would grow however, and I found I quite liked working with Microsoft 365 and cloud in general.

I pursued Terraform Associate, got a free voucher for GitHub Foundations, SC 300, Cloud+, JNCIS ENT, JNCIA Sec, JNCIA Junos, MD 102, SC 900 and a number of other Microsoft foundational level exams and applied skills tests.

I found myself really growing as an administrator and seeing how the various technologies were all very similar and the same logic could be used to troubleshoot many of them.

This brings me up until today, I am pursuing MS 102 and AZ 104 currently.

The goal is to continue working with Microsoft technologies but to also swing back and get some more AWS certifications making me fully multi cloud.

One day in the next few years, I hope to open up my own Microsoft and cloud-based consulting shop / side hustle.

I want to tackle the most ambitious projects I can and be the best administrator I can be.

To be able to get picked for the role, I think certifications will play an integral role in proving my ability to get the job done, as they have so far.

Certifications really have changed my life.

It is still a big undertaking and has a cost in terms of my free time, stress level, and test fees, but it is still cheaper and more flexible than a master's degree right now.

It is really a bummer they expire though.

It would be nice to be able to future proof my career by doing certifications and not require any maintenance.

I am coming up on my first round of renewals, as I started with Network+ in January of 2023 and certifications typically last 3 years.

Some certifications I may not renew, and in the future, I would like to consolidate my certifications into more manageable tracks for easy renewals.

I hope that if an employer requires a certification that has expired but I held previously, they can just ask for me to do it again.

I’m still researching if this is an acceptable arrangement.

I hope that in the future certification vendors will move towards easier renewals similar to Microsoft or CompTIA, rather than forcing me to sit for the test again and pay a large fee to do so.

Thank you for reading.

Jeffrey Dinackus