My Recommended List
These vendors passed the four requirements on my criteria list:
Relevant: They all offer certification opportunities that are relevant to anyone who is a tech professional.
Available: They all make their training and certification opportunities relatively available to anyone willing to learn.
Prevalent: They all offer certification opportunities for services, tools, and platforms that are industry-leading and widely adapted.
Reputable: They all offer certification opportunities that are largely known, respected, and trusted by the industry.
I’m not going to say too much about each one. Check them out and see for yourself!
Cloud
The big three in public cloud computing. There are other players in this field, but no others are as dominant as these three.
Amazon
AWS is the biggest, most innovative public cloud provider at the moment. AWS began out of necessity as Amazon’s ecommerce business was massively expanding. The tech stack at that time simply could not handle the scaling requirements that Amazon required. AWS began with SQS for message queuing and S3 for object storage. Today, there is a service for just about anything.
While Google is firmly in third place behind AWS and Azure in public cloud market share, there are still many businesses and organizations that rely on GCP.
Microsoft
Microsoft’s certification offerings have changed significantly in the past 15 years. The MCSA and MCSE were some of the most popular tech certifications at one time, but they were phased out so Microsoft could focus more on Azure.
Cybersecurity
Mostly vendor-agnostic and highly respected. There are many options to choose from when it comes to getting certified in cybersecurity, but I think these are at the top.
CompTIA
There are many companies that require an active Security+ from CompTIA before administrative access can be granted for compliance reasons. If you’re looking to jump into cybersecurity and want to get certified, I’d start here. They also specialize in foundational tech certifications, but those are only going to be helpful for someone trying to transition into tech support from outside of the industry.
ISACA
ISACA is a well-established cybersecurity certification vendor. The CISM and CISA are some of their more well-known certifications.
ISC2
ISC2 is another established and respected cybersecurity certification vendor. The CISSP and CCSP are very much sought after.
OffSec
OffSec certifications are much more practical. Expect copious amounts of hands-on experience while training for their certifications.
Monitoring
Monitoring and observability platforms will continue to grow and mature. These vendors are among the industry leaders, and they make their training and certifications available to the public.
Mastering monitoring and observability concepts will be important for almost every single tech professional. It’s hard to think of any instances where these tools will not be used in some capacity.
It may feel rather niche learning just one platform, but I don’t see it that way. There are vendor-neutral certifications for security, but there aren’t really any for monitoring. With monitoring, I think that the skills learned for one platform will translate well to another.
DataDog
Industry-leading monitoring platform. They are actively expanding and adjusting their certification offerings, but no matter what, DataDog skills will continue to grow in demand.
New Relic
Established and feature-rich monitoring platform. They offer a free tier, which would be very helpful for studying for their certifications.
Splunk
The Splunk platform is all about turning raw data in valuable insights. Splunk was recently acquired by Cisco, but it looks like it will remain as an independent entity.
DevOps
DevOps is all about being proficient in a multitude of tools and services. To get certified in some of the most commonly used ones at each level of the typical CI/CD pipeline, look no further.
It could be argued that these are also relatively niche. I don’t believe that is the case. These tools are extremely common in many DevOps environments. I’ve tried to include tools and services commonly used at each stage in the typical CI/CD pipeline.
CloudBees
CloudBees offers certifications for their own CI platform and for the Jenkins CI server. Jenkins is widely used across the industry.
Cloud Native Computing Foundation
CNCF is a part of the Linux Foundation, and offers certifications for Kubernetes, Prometheus, Argo CD, and more.
Link to website: Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Confluent
Confluent was founded by the developers of Apache Kafka. They offer Kafka training and certifications for Kafka developers and administrators.
GitLab
An all-in-one CI/CD platform, GitLab is a mature and powerful platform that will continue to be vital to software engineering teams all over the world. Consider learning more about it!
Gradle
Learn about Gradle and Maven. These are build automation tools used primarily by developers, but there are several cases where folks other than developers could benefit from knowing how to use them.
HashiCorp
HashiCorp is most known for Terraform, but they also offer certifications for Vault and Consul.
JFrog
JFrog’s Artifactory is a tool used for artifact and package management, which is a CI/CD necessity.
Mirantis
Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise, and is the de facto certification vendor for Docker. There are not many things that have been more transformative to IT infrastructure than Docker in this millennium.
Puppet
A configuration management and infrastructure-as-code tool. Even if an employer does not use Puppet in their environments, they likely will want someone who does as configuration management skills will transcend individual tools.
Platform
At the end of the day, everything has to run through networks and be processed by servers. I like the certification opportunities offered by these vendors the most.
Cisco
The king of networking. In tech, the network is at the heart of everything.
LPI
Linux skills are important for anyone in tech. Security, DevOps, cloud computing, software engineering, networking, monitoring, data science… whatever. Knowing Linux more and more will only help open more doors.
Red Hat
While Red Hat charges a ridiculous amount for their official training, there are thankfully comprehensive course guides available for their most popular certifications, which are the RHCSA and RHCE.