Let's quickly learn the ins and outs of Certification Exams. How certifications are created. The types of questions you might see on your exams, and how the exams are scored. Let's begin by getting a basic understanding of the certification process. Large companies like AWS, Microsoft, and Google spend millions of dollars developing their products. In many cases, they rely on partners to help sell those products, implement them for customers, and train customers how to use them. Let's say customer decides they want to use Amazon Web Services, but they need some help getting started. Amazon needs a highly qualified partner. If the people helping the customer aren't qualified, the customer won't be successful. This reflects poorly on Amazon and in the long run, the customer won't spend as much as they would have otherwise. Both the customer and Amazon are highly motivated to ensure whoever is helping them knows what they're talking about. That's where the certification comes in. Seems simple enough. Just creative certification with requirements that demonstrate technical competence. It's not simple though. If the certification requirements are too stringent and the exam is too difficult, not enough people would pass. If you can't pass the certification, you aren't motivated to sell that product. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all competing and oftentimes use the same partners. A company with a lot of AWS Certified consultants but few Microsoft Certified consultants would be less motivated to sell Amazon or Azure. That means they should make the certifications easy, right? Well, no. If the exams are so easy that anyone and everyone can pass them, a customer will get certified consultants, but not competent consultants. Word will get out and soon the certification will hold no value. To solve this, organizations sometimes include a real-world experience requirement along with the exam. PMI's Project Management Professional Certification is an example of this. This sounds like the obvious thing to do. However, it often creates a catch-22 scenario where the person wanting to get certified can't because they don't have the real-world experience. They can't get the real-world experience because no one will hire them; they're not certified. How does a certification teams solve these problems? At a big company, they don't just find a couple of nerdy IT guys to write some exam questions. There's a certification team in the Learning and Development Department. The people working on this team are highly qualified and knowledgeable in training and course design, as well as education theory. It's their job to design certifications that meet the requirements of the organization around having both a large number of people certified and industry-respected and meaningful certifications. To accomplish this, organizations create levels of certifications. For example, AWS has practitioner, associate, and professional level certifications. Learning professionals often use something called Bloom's Taxonomy to create certifications that demonstrate levels of competence. Bloom's Taxonomy was named after an American educational psychologist, Benjamin Bloom, who lived in the 20th century. Bloom's Taxonomy categorizes levels of learning from the most basic to the most advanced. There are six levels. These levels are remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. The Certification team will decide which level of achievement a certification should be testing for and design the requirements and exams around that level. The AWS Certified Cloud practitioner certification is described like this. ''This entry level certification is designed to validate a candidates overall understanding of the AWS cloud''. Note the word understand. This is level 2 on Bloom's Taxonomy. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate certification is described this way. "The associate exam is designed for those with some experience in designing distributed applications. Candidates will need to be able to demonstrate their ability to design, manage, and implement applications using tools and services on the AWS Platform.'' Notice the description is about doing things, applying knowledge to implement applications. This Certification is written at level 3 of Bloom's Taxonomy. Apply. The AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional is described this way. ''A professional AWS architect is someone who can evaluate an organization's requirements and make architectural recommendations for implementing and deploying applications on AWS.'' Note the word evaluate. This is Level 5 on Bloom's Taxonomy. Okay, I know what you're thinking. Why do I care about this? The moral of the story is that companies are highly motivated to have lots of certified people and they want you to pass. But they want you to pass these certifications that fit your current level of mastery and your current job role. You should look at accompanies full range of certifications, and start with the ones that are right for you. Also, assess your current knowledge honestly. Maybe you want to become a professional cloud architect, but you should become an associate cloud engineer first.
