Why We Still Believe in Certifications in an Industry That Doesn’t Require Them

The IT certification industry is a strange thing to defend. It’s expensive, it’s occasionally gamed by people who are excellent test-takers and mediocre practitioners, and it can absolutely be overdone. On a recent episode of The Creative Stack, Megan and Georg spent the entire conversation on the topic anyway, because despite its flaws, certification remains one of the clearest signals of professionalism in an industry that still doesn’t have one.

The Problem Certifications Actually Solve

Law, medicine, architecture, and accounting all share something IT does not: a licensing bar. You cannot practice law or perform a tax audit without passing a defined test administered by a governing body. IT has no equivalent. Anyone can call themselves a technician, and there’s no universal gauge for whether they’re any good at it.

Certifications don’t fully close that gap, but they help. They set a floor. They tell a client that a person was trained on a specific product or methodology, tested on it, and passed.

Unfortunately, we often see businesses treat a certification, or a wall of them, as the entire answer to that evaluation. A credential gets waved around as proof of competence, and the conversation stops there.

That’s not a reflection of certification being worthless. It’s a structural issue with how it gets used. There are people with a wall full of certifications who are mediocre at the actual job, and people with none who are excellent. Certification is one part of a larger package, not the whole picture.

A few things consistently separate a real evaluation from a superficial one:

• Ask which specific credentials the team holds, and for what products or methodologies.
• Ask for case studies and client references, not just certificates.
• Confirm the provider’s approach actually fits how your business operates.
• Treat alignment as seriously as expertise. Not every provider is the right fit for every client, and that’s fine.

The Three-Legged Stool

Certifications pay off in three directions at once. For clients, they’re a trust signal in a business that runs almost entirely on trust: proof that the people managing critical systems were formally trained, not just self-taught on the job. For staff, certifications are a path to advancement. Passing one doesn’t automatically hand someone a harder assignment, but it opens the door, because now they’re speaking the same language as the person who’s already done the work. For the company, certifications prove to vendors and partners that the relationship is being taken seriously, and they give the whole team a shared, standardized fluency in the tools that make up the stack.

Valiant didn’t always take this as seriously as we do now. There was a real stretch in the 2010s where certification wasn’t tied to advancement here, and in hindsight, that gap cost us some maturity as a company.

Unfortunately, that’s an easy trap for any growing company to fall into. Certification and continuing education get treated as a nice-to-have that individual staff pursue on their own time, rather than something the company actively invests in and tracks.

That’s not a reflection of the staff’s ambition. It’s a structural issue, one that only gets fixed when leadership decides to make it a priority rather than an afterthought.

A few practices made the difference when we shifted our own approach, roughly four years ago:

• Tie certification progress directly to advancement and role changes, not just encourage it informally.
• Give staff dedicated time and budget to pursue relevant credentials, rather than expecting it on personal time.
• Track certifications company-wide so gaps in the stack are visible before they become a client-facing problem.
• Revisit the list regularly, since the technology worth certifying on changes every five to ten years.

Fundamentals Outlast the Technology

Georg’s first certification was a basic Apple credential from 1999. Most of what it covered is irrelevant today. One thing from it isn’t: a troubleshooting method called split-half search, where you divide a problem in half repeatedly until you isolate the actual issue. It’s not something most people discover on their own. It’s the kind of thing you only learn if someone teaches it to you, and it applies just as well to a network outage today as it did to a desktop tower in 1999.

That’s the underlying argument for certification generally. The specific tools change every five to ten years. Cloud computing changed how infrastructure gets managed; AI is doing it again right now. But the fundamentals, how you structure a troubleshooting process, how you think about access and governance, how you set expectations with a client, carry across every version of the technology. As the saying goes, the best do the basics better. The basics don’t change. That’s what makes them basics.

Where Certification Is Headed Next: AI Governance

Looking ahead, AI governance is the clearest growth area for MSPs over the next several years. AI is a tool, not fundamentally different from a cloud environment or a managed device fleet, and it needs the same things: audit trails, access control, and accountability. Right now, most businesses don’t have that in place. The rule of thumb we give clients hasn’t changed with AI any more than it did with any other system: if you wouldn’t want something printed in tomorrow’s newspaper, don’t put it into a tool you don’t control. Paid, secured platforms change that calculation somewhat, but the underlying question, where is this data actually going, is one every business needs to be asking.

Knowledge and Confidence

Two of Valiant’s core values are knowledge and confidence, and certification is where both get built at the same time. It expands what someone actually knows, and it gives them the confidence to apply it in front of a client. That’s not a small thing in a business built entirely on trust.

The Creative Stack is produced by Valiant Technology, a managed IT services provider based in New York specializing in serving creative agencies and PR firms. Listen to episodes at podcast.thevaliantway.com and learn more at thevaliantway.com.