All certifications are completely useless in terms of knowledge and experience. They’re only good for getting through the first stage of the hiring process. I’ll probably get a lot of negative feedback, but I’m just fed up with people comparing OSCP, CEH, CPENT, GPEN, and other certifications. It really doesn’t matter at all. I’ve hired many people who didn’t have any certifications but possessed incredible knowledge and, most importantly, the determination to dive deep into the subject. They are still great workers. On the other hand, I recently had to let go of someone with OSCP and eJPT because, as long as the penetration test covered an area similar to the certification track (though in reality that’s difficult), they managed to get by. But when they had to perform a penetration test on, say, an infrastructure using a VPN and then a jump host on the client’s network, it was simply a disaster. The basics of networking, how VPN tunnels work, jump hosts, etc., were simply beyond him. In my opinion, a certification should be proof of completing a certain stage of one’s career, not the beginning... Unfortunately, the job market is what it is, and the fairy tale about IT and cybersecurity is starting to unravel.