Amazon recently encouraged us to take AI-themed certifications. Since there are 3 certifications to choose from (“AWS Certified AI Practitioner”, the “AWS Certified ML Engineer Associate” and “GenAI Developer Professional”), I decided to aim big by taking the most advanced one: I didn’t have a lot of time to allocate, so took the exam with little preparation, hoping that my current role at AWS prepared me well for the test. It certainly helped that AWS was reimbursing the $300 exam fee, so I figured: let me see if this certification actually tests what matters in real customer conversations. Here are my thoughts:

What does one expect from a Certification?

  • Ideally a certification should reflect that someone can actually architect and build the applications he claims to be certified for
  • Should a certification test theory or test practice? Probably a mix of both, I would say: No developer can be expected to have been exposed to every scenario, especially in such a nascent technology, so I believe that the certification should mostly test whether the developer has the right intuition of potential road-bumps.

Observations on Certifications:

  • The questions are multiple choice: This in itself is a pretty disconnect from real-life scenarios. You rarely have only 4 options in real life…
  • This is a closed-book exam: You don’t have access to the AWS Console, AWS Documentation or rather your favorite AWS MCP Server in your favorite GenAI Assistant.
  • The GenAI space is rapidly evolving and AWS and the broader ecosystem constantly launching new services and features. Hard to know whether the certification will keep up: For example, MCP Registries, Skills etc are not part of the certification at this point.
  • Lots of questions in the test are not reflective of what’s required in real-life: The exam test either some niche scenario or some feature that one can look-up in 5 minutes.

Take-aways:

  • I was able to pass the test with little actual test specific preparation (this is either good or bad): So I guess real-life hands-on experience building GenAI applications does translate in some theoretical understanding.
  • The scenarios covered in the exam do match real-life questions I have seen in practice: I definitely had some doubts while sitting through the exam, where the answer is Kiro-call away: Makes you question whether Certs are obsolete.
  • Preparation advice: I think the AWS learning resources on SkillBuilder are a good guide and great place to start. I am sure there are some good 3rd party offerings as well.

My recommendation, skip the actual cert if its your own money, and take only the practice test for free on SkillBuilder. The questions covera a lot of interesting scenarios that I did encounter in real-life: For the scenarios that you are less familiar with, I would recommend trying to re-implement some of the archictures in the AWS Console: This a a better way to learn. And unlike a certification, you will learn to ship something real doesn’t expire.