A certification is a third party statement that you know something about something. There’s positive and negative value to that. Certifications are relatively rare and powerless in the information technology sphere; compared to medicine or engineering. You won’t find a lot of self-taught pharmacists, but learning security engineering on the job with maybe some bootcamp support is a normal practice.
Positives to certification: well again, it’s an assurance that you know enough about the domain to not be wildly dangerous. We expect that the building won’t fall down because it was designed and built by certified professionals who know what materials can and can’t do and know where to ask for help. They say regulations are written in blood, and certification is a mechanism to ensure that people doing dangerous things that others will depend on are aware of the risks.
Negatives to certification: gatekeeping career paths is generally bad for diversity and equality. When the path to even getting started in a career begins with months of unpaid learning, expenses on materials and classes, and proctored tests, the only people entering that career will be the ones who can afford that burden.
As an employer, those positives and negatives form a double edged sword. If you require certification, you require more expensive employees. You can’t just hire someone cheap and train them via exposure and internal mentorship. Instead you have to start at a higher baseline in a more competitive market, and then still provide exposure and internal mentorship to help the new hire fit into your specific situation. However, that certification can also help to reduce risk, which is why the employer who happily hires software engineers without certifications wouldn’t think of hiring a lawyer who hasn’t passed their bar exam.
There are some certificate programs around information technology, but nothing as toothy as a state bar exam. CISSP is fairly well respected for security, but I’m not sure if I’ve ever met a CSDP. Vendor-specific certifications like CCIE or MCP come and go as their stringency increases or decreases, leading to special awards like MVP that show who really knows their stuff. Software development support roles have even more programs, like PMP or SAFe… there’s a bucket of these for product management too, but again I’m not aware of having ever met a holder of one of these certificates.
As a job-seeker, is it worth pursuing a certificate? As always, it depends on the roles you’re applying for, and what you want. One of the core skills of product management is to rapidly learn a subject. Not only do you need to learn the domain of whatever project you’re making product for, you also need to learn how to get what you need from all the other departments of your own organization. There’s a lot of value in having passing to strong familiarity with adjacent domains, especially project management if your organization has those. A cert course or textbook can be excellent jumpstart material. As a product manager, I regularly to get up to speed on things I know nothing about, and certification prep is a tool for that.
Preparing for a certificate and actually sitting the exam are two very different things though: for instance I’ve studied the CISSP material, but I haven’t taken the exam and don’t have any plan to. Once you’ve learned what you want to learn, there’s only one question. To be blunt: will the certification help you get a job? Maybe. At the resume funnel stage, you should consider the audience. At a venture funded startup, a PMP or SAFe label will probably hurt you more than help. It says “this person will bring process rigor that we can’t afford at this stage of our existence when we don’t even know that what we’re building is going to sell.” That said, if the startup’s mission is to build tools for SAFe development or for project managers to manage projects with, it might help a lot! And of course, if you’re applying to a very large organization with a well established market presence, it probably would help a lot to show that you’re diligent and prepared.
One last thing to consider is further down the funnel, if you get to interviewing an organization. When it comes to interviews, broad knowledge can make you more interesting and useful to talk with. The education is what’s helpful there, not the paper, but getting the paper can be a useful trick for making your brain focus and actually learn the material.
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