Are you ready to take your tech career a little further? You might be just getting started, or you’ve been working for a while.
No matter where you are in your career, there’s one thing you’ll need – technical certifications. Tech certifications are used to show your expertise with certain types of work and with different systems.
Employers rely on them to make sure they’re hiring the right person who can meet their needs. You’re likely to see a ton of different types of certifications, making it hard to know which ones are going to advance your career.
Do you want to know how you can find the right technical certifications that will help you earn more money and climb the career ladder?
Read on to find out.
1. Where You Are Now?
Are you happy with where you are in your career now? Would you like to continue on your current path or make a change?
Too many people go through their careers without a plan. They show up, work, get a paycheck and go home. That’s fine, but you’re just going with the flow of things, with no real direction.
This is your opportunity to create a plan for your career. A career plan is a map that you get to create. You get to dictate your goals and go for them.
Once you have a career plan in place, it will become much easier to find certifications for your career path.
2. Where is Technology Going?
You don’t know what the future holds, but you can make an educated guess as to where technology is going.
You can position yourself by getting a technical certification that will serve you now and in the future.
For example, more companies are using artificial intelligence in their IT departments. They’re also collecting massive amounts of data every day.
These are two jobs, along with cybersecurity, that companies have a need for right now. You can be on the ground floor of these emerging trends in IT.
5. Certifications are Paths to More Certifications
With technical certifications, it’s rarely a one and done thing. In other words, you don’t just get a technical certification and you are an expert.
Most certifications, like AWS and Microsoft certifications, offer tracks depending on your career path. These tracks are certification paths that build upon your expertise as you advance through the track.
It’s not a matter of getting one certification, but a series of certifications that prove your mastery. It’s one more thing to think about as you look at different certifications.
You want to make sure that you match the entire track with the career path that you desire.
5. Find What’s Valuable to Other Organizations
What is your dream job? Is it working for a big tech company like Google or Facebook? Maybe you want to combine passions like athletics and IT. That could lead to a dream job working at Under Armor or Adidas.
Whatever your dream job is, find out more about the path to get there. There may be certifications that the company values more than others. They may value certifications that focus on strategy or collaboration as opposed to a certain type of server certification.
You can use technical certifications to position yourself to get in front of recruiters of these companies.
How can you find out what these recruiters want? Reach out to them and talk to them. You can find them on LinkedIn.
Send them a message and let them know that you’re an IT professional who would like to work at that organization. That is bound to capture their interest. Ask them about what they look for in candidates and if there are certain certifications that they want to see.
That’s one small step to get you to the certification which will help you land your dream job.
6. Talk to Other Tech People
As an IT person, you might be shy and want to research certifications online. You can cut down on the amount of time on the process by talking to other tech folks.
Ask people what certifications they have, what they found valuable about them. You want to understand how it helped them in their career and whether or not they would do anything differently.
Be prepared for their answers to surprise you. You may change your mind about one certification in exchange for another. You may discover that an agile certification is the best path for you.
7. Where to Go for Tech Certifications
The thing you need to know about technical certifications is that they’re big bucks for many companies. They also aren’t really regulated, so you need to be sure that the certification you get is reputable.
When you decide which certification path you want to take, you want to follow that up with a reputable provider. Thoroughly vet them as to how they prepare you for certification exams. Ask them what the pass rate is for their students.
Get the Right Technical Certifications
There are dozens of different technical certifications you can get to further your tech career. You don’t want to get any old certification. You want to make sure
That requires you to make a plan for your career. Find out what’s valuable now and what’s going to be valuable in the future. If there’s a company that you would love to work for, find out what they value in certifications.
Finally, you want to make sure you sign up with a company that’s going to prepare you for the certification exam. You’ll be on your way to making more money and working in your dream job.
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