Certifications and Tech Jobs in Africa

My Tech journey has demanded that I wear different hats depending on challenge per time (HR, Operations, Product, Project, Stakeholder, Business Strategy, Co-founder ), but my most used hat over the past six years is that of a Technical recruiter and talent manager. I have helped tech startups recruit talents ranging from Software engineers (a ton of them), business developers, product managers and UI/UX designers over the past six years .

I spent some time thinking yesterday evening trying to recall if I had ever recruited any tech talent because of their certifications, the bitter truth is NO I HAVE NEVER DONE THIS. But please hear me out before we jump into any conclusions (or read me out in this case).

For the companies I directly manage and other companies that have reached out to me to help them recruit for a particular role, they had an urgent need for someone who can start delivering on the job with little or no extra training and supervision so my immediate focus wasn’t on their certifications, it was on their ability to deliver from day one. The way I check for this is to find out some of the following;

• Have you worked on a similar product before?
• Have you worked with a similar company or sector (Fintech, EdTech, SaaS, Logistics, AgriTech, Telemedicine etc.)?
• Have you deployed codes or managed a product on a similar scale before ? ( e.g. X number of daily active users (DAU) ).
• Have you worked in a team set up in a similar way before ? (distributed team where you might have to collaborate with colleagues working from other time zones, fully remote team, co-located teams).

So are certifications irrelevant?

Hell to the No!, certifications are very crucial but only after you have proven you have the ability to back them up. Certifications show a recruiter that you have attained a certain level of mastery in that field. The expectations are higher for a globally certified candidate as expected. Also certifications can become tie-breakers when there are candidates with similar experience and skills.

So the morale of this story is to start your tech journey with learning the skills you need to thrive in your area of interest in tech. You can do this by going for very practical-based training (Live bootcamps or self-paced e-learning courses) then focus on getting a job to give you hands-on experience for at least one or two years before going for certifications.

Certification exams are hard to be honest and I will be sharing some relevant certifications for tech career paths soon. But it makes more sense when you are reading for them on the back of some actual work experience, it sinks in differently. We hope this brings some balance on this matter.

With Love from Harry