AI certificates offer opportunity, confusion in job market

For IT pros, proving that you’ve developed the skills necessary to understand and work with AI may be a leg up on the competition in a volatile job market.

AI certifications can help you prove your skills—but they’re not everything. Some experts argue that showing your ability to learn is arguably more important, as is work experience.

Signs, signs. Sam Ransbotham, professor of business analytics at Boston College, told IT Brew that he sees AI certifications as just one indicator of a prospective employee’s capabilities—and not even necessarily a particularly helpful one.

“Whatever you know today will immediately start to decay,” Ransbotham said. “With AI, that’s bound to be a bit faster than even some of the fast-moving technologies we’ve seen in the past.”

Amalia Barthel, an AI instructor for Info-Tech Research Group, told Spiceworks that the certifications are part of a job-seeker’s story—but not the most critical one.

“We look at their certifications, of course, but that has to be matched with their experience,” Barthel said.

Necessary information. Nonetheless, AI certifications remain important for workers in the IT sector, as Andela VP of Learning and Talent Solutions Eric Fusilero told IT Brew, even as the technology itself evolves and changes.

Those changes will trigger a massive change in how certifications work. The half-life of technical skills in a rapidly developing space leaves people’s certification schedules dependent on the whims of an evolving technology.

“Certifications typically are something built around something that’s not really going to change that often,” Fusilero said. “The question is, how do certifications maintain that pace relative to the half-life of skills that they’re trying to validate?”

Half-life is a good term, Ransbotham said, because it hints at the overall complexity of a fast-moving part of the tech industry. AI is a changing technology where developments are coming fast and furious, meaning that certifications could quickly become out-of-date.

Big dogs. The AI certification market is dominated by big players like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Certifications in those companies are important and useful, but others exist for more specialized roles. Industry verticals have their own tools and software outside of the big three.

“Those three providers may not focus on the roles which another company might want to focus on and then you’ll have open-source and things like that adding on top,” Fusilero said. “The certification industry has evolved over the years, will figure this out, and they will adapt to it.”

Some skills last for a long time, even if they’re idiosyncratic and low-level, Ransbotham continued, and often when they’re more complicated, like modeling based on spreadsheets. When it comes to AI, it’s more likely that the simpler skills will be worthless after new updates, while deeper learning is another story.

“It’s going to be worthless at the point that the next point release comes out. On the other hand, if you’ve learned something that’s more at a principal level, then you’ve got a greater chance of that enduring,” Ransbotham said.