Certifiable

Because I am paying for a “LinkedIn Premium” membership during my job search, which has mainly been useful for letting me see who is looking at my profile, I decided to see what other benefits I could wring out of it. Access to their library of online courses was an obvious one to check out, and after a day of going through some lessons on Docker, I am the official holder of a “Docker Foundations Professional Certificate.”

As a software engineer with a fancy degree from a fancy school, the idea of certification feels a little down-market to me. It’s on the other side of that strange divide between computer science and information technology. That line has gotten a lot fuzzier over the years, with “DevOps” trying to give a name to that overlapping space between developer and system administrator.

(Look at me, calling myself an engineer instead of just a developer. Funny that the most prestige seems to have gotten attached to engineer instead of scientist. My fancy degree is in “Computer Science” but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen someone call themselves a computer scientist outside of academia.)

Another time I found myself facing that sort of divide was in high school when I mentioned to a classmate that I was thinking of taking a “shop” class as an elective and they were horrified. I was supposed to be on the college-bound, AP-class-taking trajectory.

Did I learn anything from the training on LinkedIn that I didn’t already know? Not particularly.

Is the certification that I earned on my profile now? Of course.

Now I’ve got my eye on that “Career Essentials in GitHub Professional Certificate.”