Certifications, who really benefits and why?
As head of a Global Technology and Cybersecurity team, I am no longer as hands on as I once was as an engineer. In fact, most of my time is spent on planning, strategy, forecasting, budgets, motivating, securing, removing blocks, hiring, communicating and being available to help teams and individuals solve the unexpected tech and non-tech issues.
For me in my role(s), having a general view of what the teams I lead are working with is truly essential. If you are working with any of the three public cloud providers, SaaS solutions, etc you see all the new technologies being pushed out every day.
I had someone tell me last year (2020), “At your level as a director, why would you take Amazon Solutions Architect associate level or Microsoft Azure fundamental level certifications, aren't those for front/backend engineers or for software engineers or those trying to break into IT and Cybersecurity careers? My answer was simple, training/education and or certifications are for anyone and everyone who is willing to put in the time to study, retain the content, then write the exam and hopefully pass it. Technology is fast paced, there are lots of things which haven’t changed much over the last several decades, but there are plenty of things which have changed or are starting to shift slowly and its important to have this knowledge when you/I/We make decisions big and small. Knowledge and wisdom might seem like one in the same, but they’re not. You can have knowledge without wisdom, but you can’t have wisdom without knowledge, we need both to ultimately achieve understanding. You need to keep going back and refreshing your base knowledge every year, technologies may be either expired, rebuilt or replaced by other technologies. So yes you need to keep learning no matter what.
Charles Spurgeon once wrote, “Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.“
I think there is a clear distinction between career, hand-ons experience and holding certifications on specific technology which prove you have what it takes to effectively design, implement, manage, secure, etc a top notch technology or security practice. It’s not just the college degree, endorsements, certifications, recommendations, training and further education that can help a person with their career or journey its a culmination all of these things that work together and provide us great benefits in their own distinct way.
You might be wondering, ok Mike, so who benefits from the certifications and why, the short answer is we all benefit, just maybe in a different way. Whether you head a technology team, work as a non-tech director/manager, team lead, or maybe a full stack engineer we all can benefit. The number of years work experience does always equal understanding, often the knowledge we once had no longer applies as certain areas of tech continue to evolve and change. Holding current certifications as new knowledge, along with the years of work experience helps to build your wisdom and to ultimately achieve full understand.
As a leader, i would encourage all team members to take an active part in decision making, this helps develop your people and teams to actually think for the best of the team and the company. However, as a manager, director or an executive you will delegate and distance yourself from daily decisions, you may end up with some of the deep understanding of the technology you are using. Again, this is why developing knowledge, passing those certs can help you to stay up to date.
