How much does real-world practice matter compared to certifications when building skills?

hi carolineharper​ Great question, this is something many of us wrestle with.

In practice, real-world experience and certifications serve different but complementary purposes.

Hands-on work is where real skills are built. That’s where you learn how systems actually behave, how to troubleshoot when things don’t go as planned, how to make trade-offs, and how to operate under real constraints (time, budget, incomplete information). Those skills are hard to fully test in an exam, but they’re what really make someone effective on the job.

Certifications, on the other hand, are very useful for structure, breadth, and credibility. They force you to study areas you might not touch day-to-day, help build a solid mental model of a platform, and are often valuable for getting interviews or establishing baseline trust, especially early in a career or when switching domains.

Most experienced folks I know including myself see certifications as:

• A framework and validation, not a substitute for experience
• Helpful for career progression and signaling knowledge
• Most valuable when paired with hands-on labs, projects, or real incidents

For someone early in their learning journey, a good balance is:

• Start with hands-on practice early (labs, personal projects, sandboxes, real use cases).
• Use certifications as a guide for what to learn, not just what to memorize.
• After passing an exam, go back and apply those concepts in real scenarios to make them stick.

In short: certifications can open doors, but real-world practice is what keeps you effective once you’re inside. The strongest profiles usually have both and can clearly talk about how theory met reality in their work.