Like my post on Netplan labels, this post began life as a humble Mastodon post, but it’s a thing I want to talk about.

My Story

My first permanent full-time job was as a personal assistant in insurance, where I would produce reports for adjusters from voice recordings - I was very good at this because a lifetime of messing around with computers has given me a reasonably fast typing speed and so, I could almost type at recording speed. I’m also quite good at consistently doing the same thing repeatedly, but I need to be challenged. At the time, I was the PA for an engineering adjuster who could tell I was yearning for more to do… and he was also a little bit lazy. So, he used to get me to act in a “claims tech” capacity - in other words, he would write the skeleton of a report based on his site visit, and I would fill it in with information like costings to rebuild or in a few cases, how much it would cost to replace computer equipment. Another adjuster caught wind of my computer-fu and asked me to help him filter and cross-reference from spreadsheets - those were the best days of working there and inspired me to get out.

I had a breakdown around this time, wondering what I was doing with my life as I’d graduated with a degree in Illustration Design that I couldn’t use because I was not very good. It was the end of 2017 when I changed my life for the better by pursuing my CCNA and starting Drawabox. When I started, I had no real grasp on networking - I’d seen IP addresses, of course, and understood their purpose, but I didn’t know what switches and routers were. It took 6 months of study to gain my CCENT certification - what used to be the first of two exams/certifications that made up the CCNA. I kept a meticulous spreadsheet as I studied, tracking every quiz in the book, taking handwritten notes, and labbing every concept on a physical Cisco lab that my partner had built to support me.

During this time, I was applying for every service desk job I found on job boards and desperately trying to get away from my admin job. Unfortunately, it took about a year to get into IT due to a combination of factors such as sexism and an extremely unforgiving/competitive market in a small city. My break came when I’d been interviewed and rejected for a job in favour of a candidate with direct experience in helpdesk roles. The organisation later called me to ask if I was still interested because a position opened up. I only stayed for around four months because my partner had been offered a great opportunity in another city and they could not keep me on remotely.

I embarked on my certification journey for the CCNA (ICND2) directly after the CCENT but ran out of steam a little way in because the skills felt less applicable, being more specific to things like routing and spanning tree protocols. I placed my study on hold until 2019 when Cisco announced they were updating the exam, so I rushed to get certified before that. I completed the CCNA exam in December 2019 while working for an MSP and practising my networking skills for a company that “didn’t do networking” and would not support me. I’d been attempting to study for the RHCSA for around 18 months but hadn’t made much headway on it because it wasn’t applicable where I was working. In 2021, I hopped to another job that was more in line with my interests and by January 2022, I had certified for the RHCSA, which filled in many of the gaps in my knowledge that existed from teaching myself Linux as a teenager.

2023 was the year my CCNA was due to expire, so I decided that to renew it, I would study and sit for the Cisco Certified DevNet Associate exam because I was already interested in breaking into DevOps and learning more. It covered many of the basic concepts, which I took and ran with on home projects - this blog being a prime example of that, with this post discussing the steps I’ve taken to automate the build/test/deployment of this blog, which was a previously manual process. A few months after passing the DevNet, I attained a position as a Linux Engineer with some DevOps responsibilities and have been there since.

In late 2023 and through 2024, I studied for and sat the Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam. My impostor syndrome is one of the biggest reasons this took so long, I spent so long thinking I wasn’t ready and revisiting concepts and doing courses that by the time I sat for the (practical) exam, I scored 94%. This brings me to just a few months ago when I took part in a skills challenge co-hosted by my employer and HashiCorp.

HashiCorp Skills Challenge

Three certifications, seven weeks: insights and lessons learned from my certification journey.

Timeframe:

Challenge began: 26 August 2024

Vault exam: 2 September 2024

Terraform exam: 17 September 2024

Consul exam attempt #1: 23 September 2024

Consul exam attempt #2: 8 October 2024

Challenge end: 11 October 2024

Opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not reflect the views or opinions of my employer or HashiCorp

Towards the end of August 2024, my employer kicked off a 6-week (later extended to 7 weeks) skills challenge with HashiCorp, a vendor of cloud infrastructure-focused software. The challenge encouraged participants to certify in as many products as possible, with free exam vouchers distributed to enable this. Prizes were announced, a leaderboard was established, and points could be earned by completing certifications, sharing achievements on LinkedIn, being amongst the first three to certify, and mentoring fellow staff.

I embarked on this journey, spurred on by the promise of prizes and corporate swag (I love a free t-shirt) and completed my first certification - Vault Associate (002) - on 2 September 2024. I was the second person to complete a certification and received the commensurate 20 points for my efforts. About three months before the challenge, I’d done a Vault Associate preparation course online to help gain the skills and understanding to implement a proof of concept at work - this helped a lot with speeding up my prep time as I was able to speed through Bryan Krausen’s Vault Associate course at 2x speed as revision. Those two courses covered everything I needed to know. I passed convincingly, and my transcript didn’t show any areas of improvement.

Once I passed the Vault exam, I was able to claim a voucher for my next exam - Terraform Associate (003) - I again used a Bryan Krausen course to study for the exam and as I’d used Terraform in my daily work, I was able to speed through some sections, whilst others I needed to take my time on. I did some labbing as part of my preparations, though probably not as much as I should’ve. Just over 2 weeks after passing my Vault Associate, I sat and passed my Terraform Associate exam on my first try. There were a few areas of improvement marked out on my transcript but none of them were dealbreakers.

Immediately after passing the Terraform exam, I started studying for the Consul Associate exam. As I’d recently passed my Certified Kubernetes Administrator exam, this equipped me with a general understanding of how service meshes worked and, I felt, put me in good stead for the Consul exam. Once again, I used a Bryan Krausen course to prepare for the exam. I zoomed through it in less than a week and on the day of the exam (23 September), I quickly realised I was out of my depth with a whole lot of questions relating to deploying Consul on Kubernetes that I’d never seen or studied for… and so, I failed. After investigating why there were a bunch of topics that I had no idea about, I found that HashiCorp had quietly updated the exam - I used the Wayback Machine to locate exactly when it changed, and if I remember correctly, it was somewhere around May 2024. It should not have been that hard to find.

I gave others a heads-up about what to expect during a brown bag session with the vendor liaison, with one person later thanking me for the tip as it helped them pass their exam. I received a retake voucher because the liaison agreed that it was not unreasonable to expect a course written by an authorised instructor and updated within the month to be up to date with the latest changes to the exam. I was extremely grateful for the retake voucher because it meant I could continue my certification journey. I spent around two weeks brushing up on the things I knew I’d done poorly on, mainly using the exam objectives page on the HashiCorp website, because I could not locate any courses that were up to date with the new topics.

I re-sat and passed my Consul Associate (003) exam on 8 October 2024, just three days before the challenge wrapped up and the day before I headed off on a week’s holiday. I did want to do it earlier, but there were some technical issues with the exam booking site. Unfortunately, I ran out of time and missed my opportunity to sit the Vault Operations Professional exam as all three Associate-level certifications were required before I could claim a voucher for it.¹ I will have to return next year to claim it.

Takeaways

I’ve often extolled the benefits of getting certified, especially to people just breaking into entry-level, I think they can benefit anyone at any level setting out to learn a new skill. My favourite thing about certifying is taking a concept or software I’ve never touched before, demystifying it, and becoming something of an expert in a short timeframe. It sets out a learning path before you that is structured and easy to follow and is just in-depth enough to give you the knowledge you need without getting too lost in the weeds. The most important part, however, is applying the knowledge, whether through job experience or labbing it out.

My certifications have unfortunately never resulted in an internal promotion or pay rise. I’m unsure if that’s a universal truth or a symptom of sexism², though they have absolutely helped me when hopping from one job to another because they work as a sort of shorthand for employers to conclude “Oh, she knows at least a little bit about {thing}”. As someone who is not very good at selling my skills, this is immensely helpful in getting noticed.

In my rush to get my HashiCorp certifications, I am left feeling like a bit of a fraud. The exams are set up as multiple choice and can be easily passed with some rote learning. I hope I have retained the concepts from these certs, even if they are just little nuggets of information that the pattern-matching machine in my head can associate when needed.