Are Certifications Relevant? A Photograph of a River

Are certifications relevant now that AI tools can answer so many exam questions? On their own, I don’t think they are anymore. A certificate tells me you passed a test once. It doesn’t tell me whether I’d trust you with a production server.

A Photograph of a River

I keep thinking of a certificate as a photograph of a river. It shows the water on the day you sat the exam. You frame it and hang it on the wall, and it looks like it’ll last forever.

The river didn’t stop for the photo. New versions came out, services got new names, and AI changed how a lot of us work. The picture on your wall still shows the old water.

And yes, I know certificates get renewed. Renewing one means you took a newer photo. It still doesn’t show me how you work.

Why People Get Certified

I get why people defend them. Studying for an exam pushes you into corners of a product your job never touched. When you’re starting out and your resume is thin, you need something to put on it.

Some employers and partner programs still require them. If yours does, get it, and don’t feel bad about it. Think of it as the ID you show at the riverbank. Nobody thinks the ID means you can swim.

I should say where I stand, too. I co-wrote books that helped people pass certification exams. I’m proud of those books, and I still don’t accept a certificate as proof that someone can do the job.

Does It Prove You Know What to Ask?

The argument I hear most is that a certificate proves you know what to ask, and what not to ask. I’d love that to be true. Let’s look at how most exams work.

Somebody else picked every question, and most of the answers you choose from. Some exams add hands-on labs, and those help. You still never decide what’s worth asking, so passing can’t prove you know.

We heard the same pitch about prompting. For a while, prompt engineering was going to be the skill everyone needed. Then the tools got better at plain instructions, and a lot of those clever tricks stopped paying off.

The part that survived was knowing what matters, and spotting a wrong answer that looks right. Clever wording never proved that, and a certificate doesn’t show me how you judge an answer either. If its whole value is “knowing what to ask”, it’s going down the river with prompting.

What Passing Leaves Unproven

AI tools can answer a lot of exam-style questions now. So a passing score doesn’t show me what you bring beyond those answers. It doesn’t tell me how you’d handle a production problem.

Recruiters use certificates to shrink a giant pile of resumes, and I understand why. It still doesn’t tell them how you’ll think when something breaks. That part is yours to show.

A production problem doesn’t come with four answers under it. You have to dig through a system with its own history and its own quirks. On its own, a certificate is useless as proof of what you can do today. Pair it with work people can see, and it starts to mean something.

The Effort Still Matters

You worked for that certificate, and you should be proud of it. Studying after a full day of work is hard, and plenty of people never manage it.

What you learned is still yours, and it’s worth more than the paper. The good news is that you can show it. Here’s how I’d do it.

So keep the photograph and hang it where you can see it. Then, when someone asks what you can do, show them how you swim.

Show How You Work

Start a simple notebook of real problems you solved, wrong turns included. Write down what you tried, what failed and what finally worked. Six months of that notebook says more than any exam score.

Take a slow query in a test database and make it faster. Compare the actual execution plans, logical reads and CPU time before and after. Confirm the results are identical, then explain why your change worked.

Restore a recent backup to a test server and run DBCC CHECKDB on it. A backup you’ve never restored is another photograph on the wall. A tested restore proves you can bring the data back.

Check every answer before you trust it, whether it came from a colleague or an AI tool. When your system changes, go back and see if your notes still hold.

What I want to know is how you handle an answer that looks right and isn’t. Show me what you checked and why you trusted the result. Bring that, and your certificate finally has company.

I wrote about the prompting half of this argument in Prompting Is Not the Skill. It’s an essay about why clever phrasing expires with every new model, and why judgment is the part that lasts. It’s one of thirty essays in my book AI: Nobody’s in There. But we’re still in here. All of them are free to read online, and the paperback is on Amazon.

A certificate is not proof you can handle the river, it is a photograph of it on one day.

Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.