I’ve decided to go ahead and go for the rather expensive Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) certification (and probably later the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). I cover why I think certifications are valuable and when they are not in my [Why Certify? YouTube video] but here are the main justifications that I solidly agree with after three months on the job as an Infrastructure Engineer tasked primarily with getting JupyterHub in Kubernetes working for the enterprise. Keep in mind these are specifically for someone who works mainly as a consultant, and secondarily as a YouTuber and streamer helping people learn this stuff.
That last one is particularly important. The hardest part of managing one’s learning is knowing what to learn and in what order. (This is why I have spent so much time thinking about this very thing for the Boost.)
Keep in mind that I still fully agree with the statement that certificates are only the beginning, like a college degree, a certificate alone — without other independent work, even side work — is not enough. I also detest multiple choice certificate exams and refuse to ever participate in a certification that is nothing more than multiple choice.
I’ll be doing a lot of this learning and study and preparation publicly on Twitch and YouTube and making a playlist just of study sessions for all of this. Hopefully that will help others as well. As of this moment, I believe this advice from the CNCF blog is the most up to date and have purchased my first Udemy course, ever. This will be an experiment all by itself, because I have been meaning to dual post content to YouTube and Udemy some day just for the exposure. In fact, I think my Beginner Boost series will be a good one to post there. I’ll update it every year and only have the latest one up, but will still make all the content available for free on YouTube as well.