2 min read career · learning
Thirteen certifications later: what credentials are actually for
PMP, PMI-ACP, Six Sigma Master Black Belt, SAFe, PROSCI, Harvard CORe — I've collected more credentials than most people think are reasonable. Here's my honest accounting of what they're worth.
I hold thirteen professional certifications — PMP, PMI-ACP, PMI-SP, PMI-RMP, Six Sigma Master Black Belt, SAFe, Disciplined Agile, PROSCI change management, Harvard’s CORe, and a few more. That’s enough to qualify as a collector, so let me offer the honest accounting people rarely give: certifications are simultaneously overrated and underrated, and the difference is entirely in how you use them.
What they don’t do
A certification has never made anyone good at the job. I’ve worked with brilliant delivery leads who held nothing, and certified professionals who couldn’t run a two-team dependency to save their lives. If you’re collecting credentials hoping the competence arrives with the PDF — it doesn’t. Hiring managers know this too; past the screening stage, nobody has ever asked me about an exam.
What they actually did for me
Three things, none of which are on the marketing page:
1. They forced structured coverage of a field. Self-taught knowledge has holes exactly where the work never happened to take you. Studying for the PMP forced me through procurement, contracts, and risk registers before I needed them. When those situations later appeared, I had a map. Mediocre map beats no map.
2. They gave me a shared vocabulary. Half of cross-functional friction is two people using the same word for different things. Frameworks are, at minimum, agreed dictionaries. When I say “definition of done” or “change impact assessment” to another certified person, we skip twenty minutes of translation.
3. They compounded early-career trust. Fair or not, when I was the youngest person in the room, credentials bought me the first five minutes of credibility — enough time to earn the rest with substance. That mattered more in enterprise consulting than it does now. The further you get, the more your shipped work replaces the letters.
My selection rule
The certifications that paid off shared one property: I took them right before or during the work they described. SAFe while actually scaling squads. PROSCI while actually running change on integrations. Six Sigma while I was neck-deep in process metrics. Certification as preparation for immediate practice sticks; certification as decoration evaporates in a quarter.
So my advice fits in a sentence: never collect credentials as a substitute for building things — collect them as scaffolding for the thing you’re about to build. And once the building stands, nobody, including you, will care much about the scaffolding.
The full list is on the About page, right under the work it was scaffolding for.