There are over 1,200 technology certification programs in the market today. The vast majority of them are worthless pieces of paper.
Not worthless because the content is bad or the exam is easy. Worthless because nobody — not hiring managers, not customers, not the certified professional themselves — makes a different decision based on whether someone holds the credential. The certification exists, people earn it, and nothing changes.
Then there is Salesforce. The Salesforce Certified Administrator credential appears on over 2 million LinkedIn profiles. Entire staffing firms specialize in placing Salesforce-certified professionals. The certification is so widely recognized that it has created a career path — people become "Salesforce admins" as a profession, not just as something they do at their current job.
AWS certifications are similar. Companies explicitly require them in job postings. Certified professionals command higher salaries. The credential is a genuine signal of capability that the market trusts.
What separates these programs from the hundreds that have no market impact? The answer is more interesting than "they're bigger companies."
The Market Trust Problem
A certification is a signal. Like a college degree or a portfolio of work, it is a proxy for capability — something that tells a third party "this person can do X" without that third party having to verify it directly.
For a signal to be useful, it needs to be trusted. And trust in a certification comes from three things:
Difficulty. The exam must be hard enough that passing it actually means something. If everyone who attempts it passes, the credential has no filtering power. Salesforce Admin certification has a pass rate around 60-65%. AWS Solutions Architect Associate hovers around 72%. These are high enough that the credential is achievable but low enough that it serves as a meaningful filter.
Most technology companies set their certification pass rates above 85%, which means the exam is closer to a completion exercise than an assessment. Hiring managers learn this quickly and stop paying attention.
Relevance. The certification must test skills that map to real-world tasks. This sounds obvious but is surprisingly uncommon. Many certification exams test product knowledge — "which menu contains this setting?" — rather than job competence — "given this business requirement, how would you configure the system?"
The Salesforce Admin exam includes scenario-based questions that require candidates to think through how they would solve actual business problems using the platform. This means that a certified admin has demonstrated not just product familiarity but professional judgment. That is what hiring managers actually want to know.
Ecosystem reinforcement. This is the element that most certification programs miss entirely. A certification only becomes valuable when the market starts requiring it — when job postings list it, when consulting firms screen for it, when customers ask whether their implementation partner's team is certified.
This does not happen organically. It requires deliberate ecosystem building.
How Salesforce Built Trailhead Into a Career Engine
Salesforce's genius was not the certification exam. It was the ecosystem they built around it.
Trailhead, their free learning platform, created an accessible on-ramp to the Salesforce ecosystem. Anyone — regardless of background — could start learning Salesforce skills at no cost. This dramatically expanded the pipeline of potential certified professionals.
But the ecosystem goes further. Salesforce actively partners with staffing firms and consulting companies, making certification a criterion for partnership tiers. They promote certified professionals through their community. They create career paths that map certifications to roles and salary bands. They run Dreamforce, a massive annual conference where certification is woven into the culture.
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: more people get certified because the certification opens doors, and more employers require certification because the talent pool has demonstrated its value.
What This Means for Customer Education
Here is why this matters beyond the certification itself: the certification program is the business case for the entire education ecosystem.
Most customer education programs struggle to justify their existence in business terms. Content creation is expensive. Platforms cost money. Headcount is hard to secure. And the ROI is indirect — education improves adoption, which improves retention, which improves revenue, but proving that chain of causation is notoriously difficult.
A certification program changes the equation. When customers pay for certification exams, the education program generates direct revenue. When certified professionals drive faster implementations and higher adoption, the link between education and customer success becomes measurable. When the certification creates a talent marketplace, the platform becomes stickier — customers are less likely to switch when they have invested in building a team with platform-specific credentials.
Salesforce generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually from its certification ecosystem. But the revenue from exam fees is almost beside the point. The real value is the network effect: every certified professional is a person whose career is tied to the Salesforce platform. That is a retention mechanism no feature can match.
Building a Certification That Matters
If you are considering launching a certification program, here is what the successful programs do differently:
Start with the job, not the product. Define the role the certification represents — system administrator, developer, business analyst — and build the credential around the competencies that role requires. Product knowledge is a component, but professional judgment, problem-solving ability, and practical skill should be the core.
Make the exam genuinely difficult. Aim for a 60-70% pass rate on the first attempt. This is uncomfortable for companies that want to maximize the number of certified professionals, but it is essential for building market trust. A credential that everyone passes is a credential that nobody values.
Build the learning path first. The certification is the capstone, not the starting point. Before launching the exam, build a free, comprehensive learning path that prepares candidates. This path should be valuable in its own right — people should get practical skills from the learning experience, not just exam preparation.
Invest in ecosystem reinforcement. Partner with staffing firms. Work with consulting partners to make certification part of their hiring criteria. Create a public directory of certified professionals. Celebrate new certifications in your community. Make the credential visible and valued by the broader market.
Maintain the credential. Certifications that never expire lose their value over time because the product evolves but the credential does not. Require recertification every two to three years. This keeps the certified population current and reinforces the signal that certification means something today, not just that someone studied the product three years ago.
The Opportunity Nobody Is Seizing
What strikes me most about the certification landscape is how few technology companies have built programs that actually work. Salesforce and AWS are the obvious examples. Microsoft, Google Cloud, and a handful of others have credible programs. But for every one of these, there are dozens of technology companies with products used by millions of people that have no meaningful certification program at all.
These companies are sitting on an untapped ecosystem. Their products have users who want to build careers. Their customers have hiring needs. The market is ready for a credential that says "this person knows this platform." But building that credential requires long-term thinking, genuine investment, and a willingness to make the certification hard enough to be meaningful.
The companies that do this will build competitive moats that product features alone cannot create. A feature can be copied. A certification ecosystem cannot.
