Do certifications worth more than academic education?

hi Viorel, Professional Certification is a credential that verifies someone’s knowledge, skills and abilities to perform a specific job. Some Certifications gives us extra credentials and help us getting into the jobs. You are at the right path. Most of the Companies are looking for Scrum Master/Product Owner Certifications for Scrum Master/Product Owner recently.

does a certification worths more than my academic education?

Yes and No. combination of both. Continuous learning ;-)

Hi, In my opinion certifications serve as tangible proof that an individual has acquired specific skills or knowledge in a given field. they help validate expertise, ensuring that the person is equipped with knowledge and abilities.  Also, its a sign that a person is dedicated, committed to professional growth, and proactive in keeping their skills sharp. This boosts credibility in the eyes of employers and clients.

I have a doctorate.  With that kind of education I learned how to approach new ideas and different ways of thinking.  It took years of dedication and intense study.  I have a LOT of certifications that I took to help me learn specifics and mechanics.  They took weeks or sometimes days to achieve.

If your goal is to be a worker, certs can help.  If your goal is to understand underlying concepts and create new ideas, formal degrees help that.

My list of qualifications is an obscenity, I now add to them out of devilment and have become effectively unemployable. These days, I can only really work as an independent consultant. 

Employers want people who are qualified:

• enough to establish credibility with clients
• enough to evidence due diligence in the event of litigation
• enough to avoid investing in you themselves
• not enough to challenge organizational gravity

Professional certifications are more likely to hit the sweet spot in this regard, except in the most regulated industries for which degrees are required.

The best thing to learn and develop more generally -- if you want to hack the system -- is soft skills.

It depends....

At this moment I have 73 professional certifications and micro-certifications on my LinkedIn profile...and I haven't even add the Udemy certifications of completion to that list.
Also 1 degree (Professional Bachelor) and 2 language credentials and 1 development credential.

I live in Belgium, so doing a Professional Bachelor in IT in 2000 after hours cost me €400/year for 3 years, so it was very cheap. Everything technology wise that I learned is complete obsolete by now, so nowadays it only represents that I have/had knowledge of all the fields in IT on Bachelor level and that I can proof that I can "think" minimum on that level.

Unfortunate in that time for obtaining a position in government or the banking sector a degree was a mandatory criteria.
So the majority of my fellow students were ICTers that had binders full with professional certifications that just needed a degree/piece of paper for obtaining a job on a certain level. Most "students" knew more in their fields than the professors teaching us.

Now it's almost 2025 and if I lived in the U.S.A. where getting a degree is bloody expensive, I would look at the fields within a Ba/Ma in IT and search for providers of professional certifications to cover each domain separately. It's cheaper to start earlier on the continuous learning path. 

Yet in 2025, degrees still only cost €600/Year in Belgium and you still need one for government positions. In almost 25 years the banking sector has dropped the degree requirement like most companies.

Yet the most important for people with degrees and certificates, or for people with only certificates is to get experience. Companies pay for skills (knowledge + experience) and don't really care how you have obtained the knowledge part of the skill, so long you have it.

Hope that this helps.
 

The question mixes many different aspects under one umbrella.

Treat the following as a generic opinion, anecdote.

There's this brain-drain situation going on where youngsters studying technical subjects are sucked into work just after their BSc, dropping their MSc studies - so less talent pool for potential PhDs. 
Think engineering of various domains (including software), pharma, chemistry, biotechnology, automation, so on. 

When it comes to non-technical students I'd say the situation hasn't changed that much - people complete their MAs and then try to land a job/contract.

In Poland a degree (BA, MA, BSc, MSc) gives you 8 years of "work experience" in relation to your total work experience when calculating how many days off you can have in one year. Up to 10 years of work experience (only standard, b2b is not counting) give you 20 days off per year, 10+ gives you 26 days per year according to our law. I think it was different years ago where BA and BSc gave you 5 years, but I don't really it remember that well.

Maybe it's similar in other countries - no idea.

Some jobs do require a formal degree - especially if one works as an employee (not b2b) with government or gov sponsored/subsidized companies

When it comes to standard employment (not b2b) in commercial companies - YMMV. Some do require a degree due to whatnots, some don't, the situation changes from time to time.

About industrial certifications, you never know.

I'd break those down into theorethical (black on white theory), practical skills (BPMN, UML, TRIZ, first aid, welding, so on) and technological (K8s, Prometheus, Grafana, CISCO, Jira, etc..). Of course, it's a simplified breakdown only made for the purpose of this post.

Theory:
- XYZ managerial models like Prince2, PMP, Project+, Scrum, SAFe, ITIL, PMTK- let's take ITIL Foundation as a basis. If one knows ITIL then well, it's only a matter of updating one's knowledge to a newer model as in ITIL3 > ITIL4. I'd say a similar situation goes with other XYZ managerial models. One knows basics, maybe advanced knowledge, so it's only a matter of updating that knowledge to modern times (nomenclature, different ways to model things, so on).

Practical skills:
- IDK, I've learned BPMN by myself, the knowledge is there. I guess that if one goes through a course and gets a certification after completing the course and/or passing the exam then one can be seen as knowing about that stuff. Of course, a sponsor may require an informal/formal check on that knowledge - in case of BPMN and um, welding up to some degree - you need to show your trade. Model stuff, weld things, they'll decide whether it's good enough. Special case would go for TRIZ as there are TRIZ certifications out there, though one can as well never even hear about them and still excell at TRIZ skills.

Technological certifications:
- there's an additional breakdown into theory & practical certifications. As a DevOps Institute trainer, I can see that DevOps & SRE Foundation require some technology knowledge for one to pass the exam and give a student a general overview of how things work with DevOps & SRE, yet that's that.
From that point onwards if one would like to be a practitioner of DevOps & SRE then they'd need to well, practice. Succeed, fail, learn from both - hopefully learn more from other people successes & failures, than from their own successes & failures.
Still - there's a great value in classes created by experts. Usually you can find those in your country - there are experts mostly everywhere, yet of course there are more experts in countries that do have more tech startrups and bigger companies that just give people more opportunity to get real-deal experience.

Technological certifications are time-bound IMO - sure, one can have a CISCO cert from 15 years ago, but well, technology moved on and that knowledge would need to be updated.

_

So in conclusion - YMMV. Be wary of what you are required of in your industry and your local market. 

I say that there is not that much sense in learning about portfolio level management when one is working as a service desk manager UNLESS that one has aspirations AND/OR his/her Ma/Pa are owners of a company that their kid would inherit one day.