Why majority of cloud certificates are useless?

Hi there!

Last year I managed to pass three professional certifications: “AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional”, “Certified Kubernetes Administrator” (CKA), and “Terraform Associate”. I realized that the majority of exams test your knowledge via multiple-choice questions (MCQs). This is fundamentally wrong and below I’ll explain why.

What is the point of passing a certification? Generally speaking, there are two main reasons: enhance and structure your knowledge in a particular area, and get solid proof of your knowledge on a certain topic. However, during my preparation, I realized that the first part isn’t necessary. It’s possible to pass an exam with quite basic preparation, and without any practical experience. Why is this possible? Because of the MCQ nature of an exam.

Let me walk you through my personal experience first. In the beginning, I’ll be talking about the famous AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional. The exam has been designed to be tough, and it’s tough. What is the exam supposed to test? Obviously, examinee’s knowledge and skill as an architect. Firstly, I was a little bit surprised that the solution architect exam lacks the kind of questions that include architecture diagrams as a part of the question. Diagrams are an essential part of an architect’s toolkit that is used on a day-to-day basis, but I haven’t even had a single question that includes any diagrams. Secondly, it’s a bit peculiar for me that an architects’ knowledge is tested via MCQs under time constraints. How often do you need to make an important architectural decision in 3 minutes? Is it necessary to test if an architect is capable of picking a proper tool under heavy time constraints? Usually, to make an architecture decision, it’s necessary to spend a few days thoroughly analyzing requirements, cherry-picking the right tools to solve the problem, and discussing it with colleagues and stakeholders. Does the exam test your knowledge as an architect? I don’t think so.

The second test that surprised me even more was the “Terraform Associate” paper by Hashi Corps. An exam supposes to test my knowledge of terraform, so why not ask me to write or to debug some terraform code? However Hashi Corp has decided to bombard the examinee with another set of MCQs! The interesting point here is that an exam is quite straightforward (that’s an associate exam overall), so it’s even possible to pass the test without any practical experience with the tool.

Lastly, I have a few words about the CKA exam, which is closest, from my point of view to a perfect test of actual knowledge. Firstly, it’s a truly practical exam. You’ll be given an actual cluster where you are supposed to perform a set of tasks. Secondly, tested tasks represent problems that you’ll be facing in the real world: debugging a wrongly configured cluster, deploying a new workload on a cluster, and fixing existing deployments. Even though the exam is quite challenging, you don’t feel pressured for time. It’s possible to complete an exam in around an hour or so if you have practical knowledge. I truly enjoyed the CKA exam.

Also, I would like to say a few words about these exams in general. What else is wrong with MCQ? Usually, there is a pretty straightforward strategy to eliminate one or two answers. This strategy taught almost at any course, and it also completely irrelevant to to the tested area. What’s the point of testing student’s ability to eliminate 2 wrong answers out of 4? If examinee can master “the path of elimination”, he will already have 50% probability to answer the question correctly.

There is only one good thing about cloud certification. The time that you’ve spent preparing for the topic. It heavily depends on the course that you’ve selected. I’ve seen quite a lot of courses that train you for an exam, but not for real-life problems. Likely, I’ve picked the right course from Adrian Cantrill that helped me to master certain gaps in my knowledge.

The IT industry is rapidly changing. New technologies are raising, and old ones are dying. Only certification exams aren’t yet evolved. Almost 15 years ago, I was going through the Sun certification program for Java developers. Unsurprisingly, the exam consisted of a set of MCQs. Many other companies have employed the same approach (and I’m pretty sure Sun wasn’t the first), thus the majority of the tests are pretty miserable right now.

How can the certification process be improved? Partially, I’ve answered the question above. Firstly, a practical part should be introduced where it’s applicable. Why should I answer MCSs if I can prove my skills in real life, i.e. by fixing a problem in real code? Secondly, appropriate questions have to be used, i.e. MCQs aren’t a panacea. Therefore, the bottom line is that an exam has to be as close to real-life as possible.

To conclude, I think the majority of MCQ-based exams are useless, and it makes no sense to force your staff to get another badge. The certification process looks like a cargo cult for me. If your organization forces employees to go through the certification process, it’s a good time to question the vision and the validity of the cloud leader’s strategy (if the strategy even exists).

Do you think professional certifications should change or am I wrong? I will be very happy to hear your thoughts on the topic.