I was falling into the same trap again.

So I wrote this as a reminder to myself and to anyone considering a certification just for the sake of being "certified".

Why I started the AWS Certification

I had started studying for the AWS Developer Associate certification.

As a backend engineer, I often work with AWS services, so improving my AWS skills made sense. It seemed like a smart career move—and a nice addition to my CV.

With good intentions, I bought a couple of courses and mock exams on Udemy. I was ready to commit.

Why I stopped pursuing it

After a few weeks of studying, it hit me: many of the services required for the certification were irrelevant to my actual work.

Take AWS CloudFormation, for example. It's their proprietary Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, and it's mandatory for the exam. But I had no real interest in it.

Why? Because most companies I've worked with, like the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), where I'm currently contracting, use Terraform (an open-source IaC tool). That's what I actually need to know. Not CloudFormation.

The same logic applied to other services:

• CloudWatch is AWS's monitoring tool, but I'm more interested in Prometheus and Grafana, which are more widely adopted in modern DevOps stacks.
• CodePipeline and CodeBuild are AWS's CI/CD tools, but most teams I work with use GitHub Actions or CircleCI.

I realized I was spending time and energy learning tools I might never use—just to pass an exam.

My GCP Certification Experience

This wasn't the first time.

A few years ago, I spent months preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Data Engineer certification. I learned about BigQuery, BigTable, and several other Big Data tools.

It was tough. I had zero experience with Big Data, and I failed the exam twice before finally passing.

And you know what? I've never used that knowledge in a real project.

What Matters More Than Certification

That experience should have taught me something: learning should be driven by what you actually use and not what a test requires.

Certifications can be valuable if they are strictly required by the company you want to work for (Hey, do you really want to work for them?).

So I decided to abandon the AWS cert. If I need to learn a specific AWS service for work, I'll learn it—with the goal of applying it immediately.

Time is limited. Focus on learning what makes you better at your job.

Luckily, most companies these days — aside from a few exceptions — care more about real skills than just having a certificate.

And that's great!

It means you get to decide what's worth learning to grow as a developer.