What cloud certs to get in 2026

’Tis the season to upgrade your cloud computing skills to remain competitive in the job market.

While 2025 may have felt like the year the industry focused only on AI, careers in cloud computing are still in demand. Jenni Troutman, director of training and certification products and services at Amazon Web Services (AWS), told IT Brew that the demand for cloud skills will continue to grow through next year, especially since so many AI tools are delivered via the cloud.

“It has really blown up in the last, I would say, two years as AI has become so prevalent, and AI skills have become critical to roles, and cloud skills are really kind of the foundation,” she said.

IT Brew caught up with four industry professionals to discuss which certifications mid-level professionals could use to level up their careers in 2026.

To certs or not to certs. Seth Robinson, VP of industry research at CompTIA, told IT Brew there are several reasons professionals should invest time in obtaining certifications. For one, getting a certification can ensure an individual is up to speed on “modern best practices in the industry,” and demonstrates their upskilling efforts to current and potential employers.

“That certification can be a signal to employers that you validated skills at a more advanced level,” Robinson said.

Jason Haworth, a principal solution architect at Aviatrix, added that the buzz around AI is causing roles to be “retuned and refined,” meaning professionals should develop their AI skills.

“When it comes to people actually in that mid-career phase trying to figure out what their next step is going to be, it seems pretty obvious that they should be leaning into AI and ML heavily,” Haworth said.

The Big Three. The industry’s Big Three hyperscalers offer a range of certifications geared toward cloud professionals. Troutman told IT Brew that Amazon offers a range of foundational certifications that don’t require any prior experience in the industry, as well as associate certifications that build on top of entry-level skills. She said mid-level professionals can benefit from foundational certifications, but if they are looking to go “deeper in their careers,” associate certifications are the way to go.

Troutman added that the cloud giant also has associate-level certificate options for mid-level professionals looking to brush up on AI skills: “For example, if someone was an engineer and they want to become a machine learning engineer, we have an associate level certification for a machine learning engineer.”

Charlene Cooper, director of nonprofit Cyber.org, said the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification, a foundational cert that validates AWS and cloud computing knowledge, is one she believes will continue to be in demand by employers.

“It’s really important for us that our software engineers have a credential, and particularly that one, because it helps us to be confident that they know their stuff and that we can rest assured that they’re prepared for things that might come up,” Cooper said.

Meanwhile, Microsoft offers an Azure Fundamentals certification geared toward early-career professionals interested in learning the Azure cloud platform. Mid-level practitioners also have a variety of Azure certifications to pursue, depending on their intended career path; for example, associate-level certificates like Azure Administrator Associate can help broaden expertise.

Google similarly offers foundational, associate-level certifications for professionals at varying stages of their career. The cloud giant also offers a range of professional certifications that “validates key technical job functions and advanced skills in design, implementation, and management of Google Cloud products.” Google’s professional certifications are geared toward cloud developer, cloud network engineers, cloud architect, and other industry roles.

Industry neutral options. There’s a range of vendor neutral options for professionals out on the market. Splunk recommends CompTIA’s Cloud+, which prepares professionals for roles like IT manager, cloud specialist, and cloud engineer.

Robinson said Cloud+, along with CloudNetX, can validate one’s advanced cloud knowledge and can be a good addition for general network administrators or CompTIA Network+ holders, CompTIA’s foundational network certification.

“Network+ would kind of validate the skills that you need to be that early career general network administrator,” Robinson said. “Cloud+ gives you those more advanced skills to operate more proficiently within a cloud environment or a hybrid environment.”

Robinson added CloudNetX is an “advanced expert level” certification that validates the skills of a senior cloud architect, touching on concepts such as “building the architecture and relating that architecture to business strategy.”

“For somebody that’s mid-level [and] really looking to get into that next level, maybe at their company, or maybe at another company, then that’s where CloudNetX would play in,” he said.

The Cloud Security Alliance also offers a foundational vendor neutral certification known as the Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK). The CCSK demonstrates skills in “Zero trust, DevSecOps, cloud telemetry and security analytics, artificial intelligence, and more.”

Specialist vs. generalist? For professionals debating whether or not to go all in on one vendor’s certification track or stick to more vendor-neutral options, Haworth said it really depends on the long-term goals for your career. However, he said there are some drawbacks to limiting expertise to one cloud:

“The problem with focusing on a single cloud is that if you look at recent outages of AWS, Azure, and Google, many companies themselves are starting to diversify their cloud footprint, and based upon that, they’re beginning to make a lot more [of] their applications much more portable than they were before.”