I’ve seen folks use certificates to get jobs more often than to get promotions.

Since you’re looking to land your first job in the field, relevant certificates sound like a promising place to start.

I’ve been impressed with job candidates who subscribed to a flat fee online service like Udemy, Cloud Academy or LinkedIn Learning for a year and worked their way through several courses - especially when the courses included labwork with virtual machines.

As an interviewer, I suspect that I usually accurately guess who did their homework, and who only watched the videos. Both approaches have merit, but folks who do the lab work tend to retain what they learned better.

Also - if you want to work in any computer field: Go make a website. Do it immediately.

Building your website will do a few things for you:

1. You’ll learn useful things. It’s not terribly hard, but a website has many more moving parts than you probably guessed before you started.
2. You’ll have some war stories to tell during job interviews. Nobody ever put a website online and kept it online without solving some stupid bullshit with either cleverness or persistent effort or both.
3. Try to use nothing but AI to make it. Try to use only AI to maintain and update it. It’ll be nice at first and then it will suck. Now you know why your work is worth money, and which parts of the work AI won’t be replacing any time soon.

Hopefully you’ll have fun some with it, and then get paid a bunch of money. Computers are sometimes fun and almost always a huge pain in the ass.

I once waited in line at a costume shop while two guys argued about whether getting hit by a ship voided the “no fault” deposit warranty on a moose costume.

I used to be worried about this.

Once when I was very young, I wondered if I could fix a moment in my memory and keep it for life - so I tried it.

Stupid result: I still remember that moment quite well, many decades later. It was a dumb boring moment. I’m sure I would have long forgotten, if I hadn’t tried to keep it.

Now it is a precious memory of how I have always bent toward scientific method.

All that to say: memory works better and longer than I expected.

That is, fundamentally, what some of us figure the long term plan is with Microsoft Recall.

It came with various guarantees of privacy, the first time they tried it.

But they know no one reads changes to terms of service.

The sad part is that I fully expect that to be the default reality in a few years: a Microsoft model training on every keystroke and click on every copy of Windows 11/12.