Photo by Philippe Bout on Unsplash

Why I Started Taking Certifications (Even When I Didn’t Have To)


I didn’t chase certifications for the badge. I did it to quiet that little voice that kept asking, “Do you really know what you’re doing?”

At the beginning of my career, I thought spending time studying for certifications didn’t make sense. Back then, what really mattered to me were the projects themselves and how I contributed to them.

There’s a big gap between real projects — the ones you deploy to production — and certifications, which often don’t even give you a proper playground to put theories into practice.

That’s what drove me to focus only on real projects and ignore the certs completely.

Looking back at the companies I worked for, I also didn’t have much encouragement to study or prove my knowledge through certifications. To me, that felt normal. And it shaped how I thought in those early years of my career.

But after a few years, when I reached a senior position, something unexpected happened: the imposter syndrome hit me harder than ever. I thought getting more experience would make me feel more confident, but in reality, the weight of expectations — from others and from myself — made me question if I really knew enough. That’s when I started to rethink certifications, not as a way to chase titles, but to close gaps and prove to myself that I could handle what was ahead.

I won’t say I reached this “enlightenment” quickly. But I needed something to prove to myself that I was capable of doing what I was actually doing — and to reassure myself that I was guiding my fellow engineers down the right path, you know?

In my current company, Banco John Deere, we have about 4–5 hours per week set aside to study during working hours. With some encouragement from my manager, I started thinking about which frameworks and tools I used the most day-to-day, and how I could prepare for a certification around them.

In the end, I chose to focus on the Databricks Certified Data Engineer Associate, since I’ve been using that platform for the last five years. Honestly, it felt like a good place to start — and yes, it helped my ego a bit too. I’ll write more details about this one in the next posts.

I can say that after taking this first cert, my confidence grew a little. I don’t regret spending time on it at all — it even helped my mental health a bit.

If you’re reading this and wondering whether you need a certification, my honest advice is to focus on what matters most to you right now. A cert can open new paths for your career — and sometimes, it can even help quiet the inner demons in your head, just like it did for me.

Focus on your growth, but remember to pause, take a breath, look around, and set your next goal. Maybe a new certification will be part of getting there.

Part of the series: certified-ish

Tags: #commits-&-reasons#career-logs