[ricksebak]

> Your time is better spent working on side projects, contributing to open source, writing a blog, etc. I.e. do real-world stuff

Just FYI that at some companies, collecting certificates is indeed real world stuff. Some companies use it for marketing (“we have the most certifications in the industry”) and some need to to satisfy vendor partner requirements (“AWS Premier Partners are required to have X number of certificates”). It doesn’t seem fair to penalize a candidate just because they did what their company asked for.

[noirbot]

Sure, but my question would be, are you, as the resume writer, more proud of the cert you got via your work or of the work you did at work? I've done cert stuff before as part of my job, but it never rose to the level of being relevant to put on my resume over other things I did.

My rule is always to only put something on my resume if I could talk for 2-3 minutes about it in a way that makes me look good/useful. Most of my certs, the only real thing I could say is "I spent 10-30 hours watching videos and then took a test well." I wouldn't really want to work for a company that valued those skills vs. me explaining how I applied the things I learned from the cert.