Brutally Unfiltered

This is one of the most common questions I get from students in my graduate class and I get it. Students are anxious to land on their first job and move forward.

My answer? Yes and No.

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No — It Won’t Guarantee You a Job

Recruiters receive thousands of resumes for a single job posting. Most are filtered by automated systems. Certifications alone won’t push your resume to the top because today, everyone has one.

Certs have become baseline, not differentiators.

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Yes – It builds Confidence and Perspective

Still, certifications are not useless.

They help you:

• Understand the breadth of a platform or tool
• Speak the language of job descriptions
• Apply with confidence, instead of freezing at a long list of tech buzzwords

Think of it this way: A certification won’t land you the job, but it can help you show up for the opportunity with more clarity and less fear.

My Recommendation

Pick one cloud certification.

Toss a coin,

Heads = AWS Certification

Tails = Azure Certification

Coin disappears = GCP Certification

Its not about which cloud is best, just pick one cloud, irrespective of the outcome.

Pair it with one specialization, based on your interest.

Data Eng	Databricks, Snowflake, DBT, MongoDB, Neo4J, Salesforce
DevOps	Terraform, GitHub Actions
Data Viz	Tableau, PowerBI
Data Science	AWS ML, Azure ML, Databricks ML

Beyond the certifications don’t forget the basics

• Linux
• SQL
• Python
• RegEx
• Git
• DSLs like Markdown and Mermaid
• Docker/Podman

What About Projects and GitHub?

Yes, working on real projects is valuable. And yes, linking a GitHub repo shows initiative.

In the age of AI, anyone can generate a project in a few hours.

Most hiring managers know that, and they don’t have time to verify authenticity.

So don’t just have a GitHub repo, talk about your project:

• Write a blog post explaining your thought process
• Record a short YouTube video demoing it
• Share what didn’t work and how you debugged it

Authenticity and clarity > automation and volume.

Finally

Certifications don’t get you the job.

You do : by building understanding, confidence, and curiosity.

Certs are one way to start. From there, keep learning, keep practicing, and most of all, don’t be afraid to try things.

Even if AI gives you the answer, be brave enough to run it in the terminal.

Good luck.