Certifications have always been about benchmarking and assessing IT professionals’ ability to use technology and provide something of a guarantee that candidates are competent with needed skills in the workplace. But as DevOps, continuous delivery, agile, scrum and other frameworks become necessary, the question around certification of these skills becomes this: How can you accurately assess and measure the less-tangible, softer skills hiring managers require? And if you’re an IT pro, do you need one or more of these certifications at all?
“This isn’t so different from the existing certification world in that it’s about measuring people’s ability to use tech to drive the business. We can use certifications to verify that they have the hard skills to do the job and use certain tools, but we also need to measure understanding of principles and best practices around technology,” says François Déchery, co-founder and vice president of customer success at continuous delivery solutions company CloudBees.
