Are Cloud Certifications Worth Your Time?

IT certifications have been around for ages. They can help IT professionals boost their resume and keep their skills sharp. The community is often split on the benefits of cloud certifications, however, with some finding them worthwhile and others arguing that cloud is too broad of a category, with too many competing vendors and platforms for certifications to be valuable.

IT certifications have always been vendor-driven, however, and if you expect to work with a specific vendor’s tools, a certification can be one way to help you secure a position or provide better service to your company’s clients. If you’re a Managed Service Provider (MSP) or cloud channel partner, a certification might help you get more business, too.

What are the main pros and cons of getting cloud certified?

What ARE the UpsideS of Certifications?

The most obvious benefit of a cloud certification is that is might make you more attractive to your current or potential employer. You might be able to use it to leverage a pay raise or promotion, and your company can advertise your department’s skills to clients.

Preparing for a certification test can help you get a handle on best practices and nitty-gritty details alike. For example, the CompTIA Cloud+ certification has questions like:

• Which of these storage provisioning methods is implemented at the SAN hardware level?
• What are proper resource monitoring techniques?
• Explain the differences between hypervisor types.
• Which of the following is the meaning of IaaS?

Vendor specific questionnaires might have you tailor your answers more towards a particular product, but they will also require the same mix of general and specific knowledge in order to pass.

Beyond gaining you career opportunities, plus basic to advanced knowledge of cloud as concept as well as individual solutions, some certifications can expand your abilities in related IT realms like security, networking, and governance.