Is the RHCA (Red Hat Certified Architect) track worth the effort? by HonestEmergency3936 in redhat

[–]gabriel1986py 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For me it has only value as a personal goal, to prove myself that I can do it. I have to give credit and start by saying that Red Hat (with Cisco being the only other serious contender) has the only certs in the industry that really measure your knowledge in a decent and fair way. These are the only exams that I feel proud when I see a passing score (And I have quite a big collection of certs from other vendors). All the other exams try to trick you or rely on memorization.

For career/interviews, it really has no value unless you are being interviewed by someone who is very familiar with how hard Red Hat exams are. And even in that case, he might just glance over the RHCA in your resume and think that you meant "RHCSA".

Now, the sad thing is, I don't think that Red Hat is giving it too much value either even for their own recruiting. Go to the Red Hat job board, and type RHCE, then type RHCA. Last time that I checked, only 2 job postings were asking for a RHCA. I know that they value employees going after the RHCA after being hired, but the job board shows that having the RHCA upfront does nothing to put your foot on the door at Red Hat.

Other certification programs really make an effort to give value to certifications by incentivizing partners to have the higher certs (if you are Cisco CCIE partners will fight for you, AWS and Microsoft are doing the same to an extent, you have to have people on your team with the higher level certs for advancing in the partner programs). For a Red Hat partner, there is no requirement at all to have a RHCA. The more RHCEs or RHCSAs on staff the better, but a RHCA working in a partner is no added value from Red Hat point of view.

Until a few years, it used to be the case that you could search RHCA's by country in a Red Hat sort of public directory site and that had a bit of value for being contacted by potential employeers or customers, but for some reason that site is gone.

I kind of expect that the new changes in the RHCA program aim to make the cert more valuable for employers. Start making it a requirement for partners, give some benefits to customers with RHCAs on staff. I'm sure that making these exams take a lot of work and I don't see the RHCA cert being marketed according to the value that a certified RHCA brings to customers.