IT certifications are a great way to stay up-to-date with modern technologies and to confirm one’s technical knowledge to be in line with industry and specific IT vendor expectations.
Pretty much every major IT vendor has a number of certification paths available. It’s very common for certifications to be bundled with professional education courses. In some cases the integration of education material and certification exams is so tight that courses become formal pre-requisites to obtaining a certification.
Certification Paths
You will start with a basic (Associate) level of certification and can work towards Professional and eventual Advanced certification – most likely attending professional training courses and gaining practical skills as you’re working through relevant exams.
Operating System Certifications
Each of these vendors offers a comprehensive set of certifications of managing their respective OS products:
- Microsoft (Azure): Windows, Azure, Office 365, Cloud Architecture, Security, AI
- RedHat: Red Hat Linux, Ansible
- Oracle
In addition to this, The Linux Foundation offers generic courses and certification paths for Linux-based operating systems:
Cloud Infrastructure Certifications
All of the leading cloud provides have certifications available for their offering:
- AWS: Architecture, DevOps, SysOps
- GCP (Google Cloud Platform)
- Azure (by Microsoft)
- IBM Cloud
- OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)
IT Certifications
Here’s the ever-growing list of IT vendors in DevOps space providing education courses and exams as part of their certifications:
- Oracle (formerly Sun Microsystems): Oracle database, Java, Solaris, PaaS
- VMware: vSphere, NSX
- HashiCorp (Terraform, Vault, Consul)
- Cloud Native: Kubernetes
- Cisco: certifications in networking, security and data centre management, Unified Communications
