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Comment by DEDLINE | Hacker News Reader

I loved AMZN's cloud certifications. Not a Data Scientist / ML Developer, nor am I trying to be, but I love sitting for these exams as I believe the amount of study gives you enough credibility to have thoughtful conversations with specialists.

Looking forward to reading sentiment to see if the curriculum is industry relevant and worthwhile!

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We can agree to disagree on that. The certs are useful if your business requires them for whatever reason but my standard take is any cert that doesn’t require hands on learning, such as RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE, tend to be a pointless exercise in reading comprehension. I say this as someone with several AWS certs.

Agreed certs are for talking the talk, experience is for walking the walk. Consulting companies are root of majority of cert takers from my experience.

What are some certs that you believe are worth investing in (i.e. ones that do require hands-on learning)?

Mentioned in initial comment (probably could have been more clear that those are the certs that require hands on learning):

RHCSA/RHCE/CKA/CCIE are the first ones that come to mind.

Thanks for your response.

Do you believe that those certifications are solid investments for any IT professional (from developer and up) or only for those that are looking to become a SysAdmin/Network Engineer? (forgive me if my terminology isn't spot-on)

Agree. At the very least the cert needs to have at least a simulation of a real-world environment or processes. Textbook reading or listening to lectures for pure information is the lowest tier of knowledge IMO because it is easy to simply memorize and regurgitate. The real skill is taking that information, converting it to knowledge and being able to apply it to real-world problems to create solutions. The cert will only be able to take you so far but it should at least put you in that direction.

The "credibility" point is important. As I say in all data MOOC-related HN threads, these types of courses will not make you an expert, but they're very good at giving a background on the terminology so it's less arcane.

The AWS certs are really good.

You don't become an expert, but get a good feeling for things to look out for when building your services.

What are some of your favorite MOOCs/certs? Slash what do you deem to be some of the "best" or most worth for its ROI?

The best thing to do with the highest ROI is your own projects for a portfolio, ideally things which haven't been done before (e.g. in the context of data science/ML, not the Titanic dataset or sentiment analysis of Trump's tweets).

Everyone has their own learning style, but I stopped doing MOOCs once I realized that doing work in a similar domain is more practical.

Thanks for your response. I agree that portfolio projects show more about a person than their certifications. I never liked taking exams in school anyways. :p

Regardless, do you think that there are any MOOCs/certifications that are worth investing in, if you were going to get one anyways? Say, if your employer is paying you to get one, etc.

Most MOOCs from what I've seen are so basic to even take seriously. For example if you are learning some course called physics 101 which claims to be equivalent to college level. The real physics 101 in the classroom will be comprehensive in the sense that you learn all the material over 16 weeks by studying 15 or so textbook chapters - the whole subject in detail. The MOOC on the other hand will only cover the first 3 chapters or cover all 15 chapters but only the absolute basics of each chapter. The worse part is people take these courses and think they have a physics 101 understanding of the subject when in reality they only have pre-physics 101 introductory knowledge. It becomes really obvious what their knowledge level is.

I like the idea of MOOCs but there is a very serious quality issue with them at the moment, even the MOOCs from big name universities are a joke.

I took Cryptography I on Coursera. It is a very comprehensive and stringent course, and therefore stands out among all the other watered down MOOCs. Yet the discussion forum and comment fields are filled with students angrily complaining how hard the course is and how the teacher is condescending in saying things like “it should be obvious”, “as is known to everyone”.

I guess these students ruined MOOCs for everyone else. Schools now know that when they put out an advanced course, not only do they reap little reward, but also alienate lots of people who think their intelligence is insulted.

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