After nine years of working in IT, I finally got my first certifcation

I’ve been working in IT for nine years doing help desk, system administration, data reporting and app development…but I’ve never gotten any official credentials. The big benefit of working in tech (I was told) is that if you can demonstrate your skills for hiring managers, it’s possible to get hired into good jobs even if you don’t have a college degree or formal certifications. That’s how I got into the industry - starting as a call center help desk tech for iPhones, I moved up across different companies, transitioning to working on computers, to managing databases, to building dashboards and programming backend applications and scripts. I achieved that primarily through self-study. Surely, I thought, that with my ecletic and evolving skill set, I would never need to get any formal credentials to continue my career in tech!

…so anyway, I’m now CompTIA Cloud+ certified, and I’m currently working on getting two more through Microsoft (DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate and DP-800 SQL AI Developer Associate).

So why get certified now?
Two big reasons. The first one is that the job market now is much different than how it was in 2020. With a glut of AI-driven applications and processes jamming all parts of the hiring system, being able to stand out among the crowd is now more important than ever. Companies are using AI and other tools to do heavy filtering, and with faced with choosing between me and someone else who has more formal credentials and training, the latter is more likely to end up out of the slush pile. I want a chance to rise out of that pile too. I can do the work but I need a way to prove it.

This blends with the second reason I decided to get certified. For my whole career I’ve been self-taught - I used to lean towards the project-oriented school of thought, which states that you can eschew the traditional curriculum-based education and gain “real skills for the real world” by focusing on building projects and learning as you go. The idea is that you’d progress faster, become more “agile” and get experience with real-world applications right away. But what project-based learning fails to address, however, are the holes in your fundamental skills that spring up if you only approach learning in this manner, which leaves serious gaps in your knowledge that you mnight have to fill in later.

This is how my programming education turned out. I’ve taught myself Python, SQL, and C#/.NET through projects and tutorial, only to find myself flummoxed by basic concepts I would have known already if I had systematically built up my skills from the foundations. More recently, I’ve come to realize this approach is more effective when I began taking traditional art lessons - compared to all the years I spent off and on trying to teach myself drawing, I’ve developed more skills as an artist over the course of a single year just by working the ordered curriculum presented at New Master’s Academy. (Not a spokesperson, just really impressed with the product.) It got me thinking - would a lot of the problems I’ve had over my career be migitated if I had been patient and got formal, systematic training from the beginning? I think it’s most likely.

So with that in mind, I decided to get my first real IT certification the traditional way. My long-term goal for my career is to get into data engineering, and I figured getting the Cloud+ certification was a good start to get familiar with cloud computing in general. But I needed to get up to speed quickly - and going fully self-taught was probably not going to help.

Preparing for the exam
Here’s what I did:

• I took a week-long training course in person. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve been in a classroom, but I figured five intensive days of learning directed by a teacher was better than spreading that learning over several months on my own. More importantly, the curriculum was already laid out - if you’re self-taught, there’s the overhead of figuring out what you need to learn in what order, and these days I ain’t got that kind of time, to be honest. If you’re able to clear your schedule temporarily to learn something all at once, I recommend it.

• If there’s one thing I wish I was shown while in school, it would’ve been how to actually study and retain information for a test. Fortunately, this time I had a great resource in How to Become a Straight-A Student by Cal Newport. I’ve been following Newport for years but this was the first time I attempted to use his college study material alongside a course. This book was indispensable, helping me take the notes I had gathered in class and translate them into a question-and-answer format, which helped me perform quiz-and-recall strategies to retain the information over time. I wish I had this book earlier in my education - without it, I don’t think I would have passed this exam.

• I also used Anki decks for spaced repetition. This is the first serious time I’ve attempted to use Anki, and once I got over the small learning curve and figured out the best way to write cards (one question and one answer only for each), it became a lot easier to memorize concepts.

• As part of the course, I was also given access to CompTIA’s CertMaster platform, which includes activities and labs to do within the course textbook. The labs were okay - though they covered some parts of the exam, they never covered other situations I ended up encountering on test day. I’m not sure where else to find good labs for Cloud+, but if I had to do it again, I’d probably use another resource with more comprehensive coverage over CertMaster.

Taking the exam
I took a month to study for the exam, but actually taking it was harder than I expected. I think it was because it expected you to have more knowledge from the other CompTIA certifications that preceded it, which is reasonable, but for someone like me without those certifications, I felt I wasn’t as prepared as I could have been for the performance-based questions. CertMaster had nothing to prepare me for some of the questions the exam asked - in fact, the PBQs it offered never showed up on the test in any form at all! The PBQs I ended up getting were completely different in format. I don’t know if CertMaster hadn’t been updated to reflect this or they expected me to wing it based on what was in the existing labs, but it felt like a rug pull, I’ll be honest.

Still, all of my studying paid off and I was able to push through, earning the Cloud+ certification in July 2026, a month after I had taken the training course.

So what’s next?
Getting Cloud+ certified taught me a lot about how I learn, and the best ways for me to study. I’m going to apply that to my next certification, Microsoft’s DP-800 SQL AI Developer Associate credential. I know a good chunk about working in databases already, but I’m eager to see what new things I can learn, and I’m eager to patch any parts of my skillset that I haven’t addressed before due to my old way of learning things.

I’ve also started to build projects in the cloud. I’m already tackling the Cloud Resume Challenge (you can find my repo for the challenge here) but I also want to build big virtual machine and cloud networks in Azure, to really understand how it all fits together and prepare me for using Azure for my data career. I just have to be careful of resource costs, I’m definitely not a business with a big budget, after all!

In the meantime, I’m proud of my progress, and I’m proud of taking that long-awaited first step in getting officially certified. I’m excited and ready to keep moving forward and get even deeper into the Azure ecosystem.

(But you know, Amazon, I’m open to AWS as well, and a longer trial period for Amazon Prime. Just saying.)