[ManlyBread]

My current company tries but does it very poorly.

I work for the so-called "software house". They keep on asking if I want to do a cloud cert yet they don't really provide any course materials nor allow me to take time off to focus on learning. This is a very common pattern for these certs and I've seen the same in other places as well; there's always someone who wants you to get that certificate but you're never really provided with anything to help you reach that goal. It makes it feel like the entire ordeal is pointless to begin with.

Recently the client I work for started moving to Kubernetes, which we did not use previously. It took my company 6 months to organize a Kubernetes course for us. The person who prepared that course was a relatively inexperienced engineer from an another team that never used Kubernetes in production. The engineer himself tried his best but in the end that person was not a very good teacher (which I feel is the natural outcome, this person was not hired to organize course work) and we never moved past the tutorial level knowledge-wise. Personally I got nothing out of attending these sessions aside from the liability of having to work on tasks related to Kubernetes (previously we didn't work on them as it was understood that we have no training, but now that we have "training" we are supposed to pick up that work). I feel like I was tricked.

[newswasboring]

Any discussion on why this was an inhouse training? Why not just buy a couple of udemy courses for everyone? For that matter they can just give you a youtube playlist and then have doubt solving sessions. Would have been cheaper than paying an engineer for half a year.

[ManlyBread]

They did it because the company policy is to provide in-house training if possible. At first we were to get it ASAP, but then ASAP became "soon" and "soon" became "6 months". The engineer in question is just a regular engineer, they just handed him the additional responsibility.

Either way, they could have just paid an another company to get us a real course but they'd rather pretend they have competent devs rather than actually have competent devs.

[taormina]

Don’t worry, your intuition that the cloud cert is useless is spot on.

[ManlyBread]

Unfortunately it's also tied to corporate politics. If I get this useless cert it will get listed as an "accomplishment" which helps in getting a raise / promotion.