Studying for my AWS Solutions Architect Re-certification

I recently saw someone post that they are not a big believer in certifications, but they were curious what ones other people consider valuable. My initial reaction was that I don't think they are extremely valuable, either. That, despite the fact that I have my PSM, AWS Systems Architect Associate, and Azure Solutions Architect Expert certs, and I am currently working to re-certify for the AWS one. My initial motivations for all of those was a mix of helping my own career and helping my employer. That got me thinking: are they worth it?

My AWS Solutions Architect certification expired last year. I first took the test and was certified in 2018. I had logged into AWS and seen CloudWatch before I began studying, but otherwise it was a firehose of new information. Fast forward to 2020. I had been working on a client that used Azure. Clients tend to not want consultants to touch their cloud services without a cert, and no one at my employer had any Azure certifications. I decided to go for the Azure Solutions Architect Expert (equivalent to the AWS SA Professional) certification. That required a lot of new learning of Active Directory and the minutia of Azure Virtual Machine types when I'd never used Azure. In 2021, I had just changed employers and lacked the mental bandwidth to go through the AWS re-certification.

Four years after my first certification, AWS now feels very intuitive. I don't actively set up many services on a day to day basis, but I'm now daily looking through CloudWatch Log Groups and interacting with Lambdas. After several rounds of certification and training, many of the things I don't do daily still feel obvious. I've been able to watch most of the videos at faster speeds and multi-task during many of them or alternate between this course and my learning python begins work. For roles that I have been in, knowing offhand which instance type to provision is probably overkill. However, I'm leaning towards voting that "Yes, the certifications have been beneficial." They force you to sit through learning things services and topics that you don't run into in your day to day work and even though a lot of it is gaining knowledge without the wisdom of truly using the offerings and learning from the trials, I think that knowledge is a good beginner step and a demonstration that you are taking the steps.