Practical Skills over Certificate Grind

We were recently looking for a junior and a senior security engineer. I was part of the interview process as a senior team member and found that certification matters very little and, in some cases, can even hurt your evaluation. Certifications will get you the interviews, but here are the highlights we encountered: 1. A person has multiple AWS certificates, but when we ask questions related to AWS - no answers. 2. A person has a Security+ cert but can't answer questions about CSRF and SSRF.

Maybe we were unlucky to encounter these folks, but thinking about it, I concluded that if you do not apply your skills, your knowledge fades, and those certificates mean nothing or can even hurt you. I wouldn’t ask about some advanced AWS topics if I didn’t see the AWS cert to test the knowledge.

My recommendation: Certificates should be taken only to improve your knowledge, not to gain it. Any IT-related experience is, in most cases, ten times more valuable than a certificate. If you don’t have the experience to apply certificate-related skills, apply your skills with personal projects. For example, if you have AWS Security/Solutions Architect/Whatever certificates and don’t actually have work experience with AWS, build your own complicated infrastructure with CloudFormation/Terraform and reflect that in resume. This way, you learn IaC, apply your knowledge, and may remember things better than "learn it for the exam and forget the next day"

This might be a bit of a hot take, but people spend money on certificates and avoid using paid services to learn practical things. You will never learn by just reading and grinding multiple-choice questions. You HAVE TO apply your knowledge. I have a friend working with audio, and he laughs at how "cheap" it is for my profession to use paid tools to gain knowledge. He spends so much more on essential tools that it’s not even comparable. submitted by /u/ParticularAnt5424
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