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I’ll probably get a lot of heat for my latest “hot take,” but I recently started asking myself again if certifications are dead. “Why,” you may ask? Because I think that individuals, and even companies, especially consultancies, are investing a lot of time and money into churning out certifications in order to increase partnerships or to increase callbacks on open roles.

Where I really see the death of certifications playing out is in the interview process, and AI is not helping matters (though that is a different “hot take” and/or rant for another time).

Story Time

A few weeks ago, I was conducting an interview. I needed a couple of resources to help with a project and had engaged with a consulting firm in hopes of partnering with them to fill the roles. The resumes I received appeared to check all of the boxes, but “Snowflake Certifications” were elevated to the top of the resume and in font larger than the job experience.

First, when I look at a resume, I want to see your on-the-job experience. For me, your education is second. I’ve employed some fantastic rockstar resources with little to no formal education beyond a High School diploma. Especially in a world of Google and AI, I care less about whether you can remember rarely-used concepts and more about whether you know how to apply them in real-world scenarios. Do I reject your resume out of hand? No. Do you hit my radar at a higher ping than other candidates without certifications? Also, no.

With all of that said, I did what I always do. I gave them a chance to speak to their skills and experience. Two interviews, identical results; all other interviews from the consultancy were canceled. It all boiled down to one thing: the candidate could speak to what they learned from studying the certification material and passing it, but they couldn’t apply it to real-world situations, talk through its applications, or even explain when one concept should be used over another.

Now, I know I am speaking vaguely, so let me give an example. I showed the candidates two views, one referencing the other, alongside an underlying table definition and a query execution plan in Snowflake. I explained that there were no errors in the code, that no coding was required, and made a few other points to address concerns that people might think there’s a “gotcha” or start to fear they will have to code on the fly. That isn’t me.

I’m not here to throw curveballs with missing commas (that is why we have linters) or ask you to spit out code/psuedo-code. I want to determine whether you understand the concepts you put on your resume, can speak to them, can defend them if needed, and understand how you approach solving an issue. Determining the best solution is more important to me than whether you can vibe-code the solution.

The first question for each was simple: look at the execution plan and tell me a quick win for optimizing the query. The first clue was the lack of a filter on eight years of hypothetical data, and 2.1 GB spilled to disk. Two answers I would’ve accepted? Increase the warehouse size, or determine whether the business can live with a time-constraint filter. What did I get instead?

Neither resource could understand the query execution plan. Oh, they could tell you what they were for, why spillage is bad, and even explain the concept of a micro-partition. Throughout the entire interview, however, they couldn’t apply their 2+ Snowflake certifications to real-world situations.

Of course, from there, it continued to go downhill. The resources couldn’t explain what a common table expression was, but then gave me very textbook answers when I said “CTE,” and neither of them even suggested we materialize the underlying view into a table to potentially leverage better caching, clustering keys for micro-partitions, etc. Neither resource called out the performance risks of carrying a large variant field that was accessed only for one value via a table and two views, or the fact that one of the CTEs pulled in results that were never used in a JOIN, WHERE, or SELECT clause.

To further add fuel to the fire, one resource was clearly using AI to answer questions. I start every interview with some standard questions to establish a baseline. We start very simply with a question like, “What is the difference between a LEFT join and an INNER join?” The questions get progressively harder until they can’t answer, and then I stop. I’ve now established how senior you are.

The hands-on exercise described above is how I gauge your skill based upon your baseline, as I can make it as simple or as complex as the “level” you reached in the initial questions, I can get an idea for how you approach solutioning and problem-solving, and it also lets me ask questions that are impossible to use AI on a call to answer (no copy and paste on a screenshare, so your companion AI doesn’t have context). When your answers move from sounding like something I’d read in a college textbook to stuttering, long pauses, and confusion, even though the technical topic hasn’t changed, I see red flags.

The Certification Paradox

In an ideal world, certifications would help show that a candidate has demonstrated a firm understanding of key concepts. We’ll continue to use Snowflake as an example. If I see a SnowPro Core certification, I assume you understand the basics of Snowflake and have worked with it for some time.

The reality is that the certifications are standard, and some certifications even have only two to three versions of a test that cycle every few months. If you have enough crowdsourced input from test takers, you can back your way into a study guide that is verbatim from one of the test proctors. We’ve moved from testing your skill to testing how well you can memorize questions you’ve already seen.

Even if you haven’t had the luxury of crowdsourcing each version of a test, most of these tests are built to be passed through either rote memorization of the concepts or by actually applying the skills to real-world projects. The latter is what we all hope for, and even Snowflake, as an example, says that you should have X amount of experience using their platform before you can successfully pass the SnowPro Core exam.

We further degrade the certification’s quality by having very lax retake criteria. Sure, you have to pay for each retake, but the cost of doing so is minimal in exchange for the potential return. Let’s say I spend $600 to take an exam twice, and pass it on my first try. In consulting, that is about a day’s worth of work or less, depending on the billable rate and margin (if applicable for non-independent consultants).

In short, certifications have no built-in mechanism to penalize those who commit hours to rote memorization rather than comprehensive study.

Certification Churning

This one is a big one for me, and I’ve seen it in practice. When I worked for Wipro, there was always a strong push to get certified. Let’s break down all of the reasons:

• More certifications = higher partnership tier. These partnerships include kickbacks on shared ACV, and higher tiers usually translate into free leads from the vendor.
• More certifications usually mean faster placement on a project and less time on the bench. At least with Wipro, if you spent more than X days on the bench, you were just let go. It didn’t mean you were bad at your job; it just meant they couldn’t find a project to put you on, so that became your problem. Resources with a certification received higher placement treatment than those without, assuming you could slide by without meeting the handbook policies requiring a minimum number of certifications.
• All study material was crowdsourced and kept in a central repository. Sounds great, but part of the learning process is finding the relevant study material yourself. Sifting through what is important and what isn’t, and learning things along the way that are useful, even if they are not applicable to the exam.
• Sample tests in abundance. Sign up five people to take the same test on the same day through the same proctor. Most likely they’ll all get the same test. Assign each of them a cluster of 20 questions (1-20, 21-40, etc.) to remember, and then immediately write them down after the exam.
• An endless budget for exam-taking means you just keep trying and trying until you pass. Your only hurdle is the waiting period each vendor imposes for retaking an exam, which isn’t nearly long enough.

I could go on with more examples, but let me tell you where things started to fall apart for me. I was a Global Director in Wipro’s Salesforce practice, responsible for data migrations and integrations. Toward the end of my time at Wipro, our U.S. based offices were pushed to staff our projects with at least 80% offshore team members. The downside to this, being that I was U.S. based, is that the offshore team was A) extremely large and impossible for me to know each team member personally, B) I had no insight into their past experience or a professional connection where I could know their skills matrix, and C) many times we were given resources from other practices who were on the bench and simply needed to be staffed.

How were they qualified to engage on these projects? Certifications. I asked many times why a resource from the Workday practice should be doing Salesforce data migrations. The answer? They had a Salesforce certification and had taken a few Udemy courses on data and/or SQL (which was critical for us, as we used SQL Server and DBAmp to move data). The reality? The project would almost always go “red.”

Now, this wasn’t confined strictly to offshore. Our nearshore and onshore consultants had the same issue. However, those teams were smaller, and I had the benefit of at least knowing about the individuals if not having already worked with them. I could quickly tell you if a resource met the skill criteria needed for a project.

Even today, I continue to see this as an issue. Hiring direct-to-hire has the same issues. A candidate comes in, espouses their certifications and Udemy courses, and then can’t perform the basic duties of the job. The certification would tell me they check all the minimum criteria and even some of the preferred ones, but in reality they can barely scratch the surface of the minimum criteria.

In short, the value of certifications is diluted by candidates who abuse the system, and there isn’t a good fix for this problem from a vendor perspective.

Certifications Are Dead

All in? I think certifications are dead. My interview matrix has a maximum of 100 points. If you have a certification, you automatically get 10 points because I know you can at least study and memorize material. Those 10 points are purely based on your ability to retain information and do not count towards my criteria for whether you are skilled for the job.

If I am being honest, I’ve come to feel the same way about University diplomas. With the obvious exceptions of things like being a Doctor, a lawyer, or some other specialized field, all a diploma tells me is that you showed up for class, turned in your assignments, and memorized a study guide.

I mean, when I was in college, almost all of the professors reused the same test, and if you didn’t use an online resource to download someone’s old test, my fraternity usually had copies from when past fraternity brothers had taken the course with that professor. Being young and naive in college, I hungrily studied these and passed some of the most boring classes by memorizing the material the professor would repeat every semester.

Do I have a fix for the problem? No. Do too many companies put too much weight into certifications and diplomas? Yes. Does AI make this habit of “fake it until you make it” during the interview process worse? Absolutely.

So, what can we do as hiring managers? We can ask questions that demonstrate skill (and I’m not talking about coding exercises or surprise tests). We can give real-world scenarios that make it almost impossible to use AI or give textbook exam answers. We can take the time to actually read a resume’s experience section and ask questions to determine if the experience is real or AI slop.

In short, we can make it clear that churning through certification exams does not automatically put you ahead of candidates with actual skills, experience, and the ability to perform the job duties.

“Thank you for attending my TED Talk.”