Need Help Choosing the Right Certs – DevOps/Cloud Career Path

Hey everyone,

I’m currently a grad student graduating this May, and I’ve been doing an internship since last Fall where I’ve been working mostly with AWS. As I’m starting my full-time job hunt now, I feel the need to validate my skills with some certifications; just to have that extra edge on my resume and feel more confident about what I bring to the table.

What I’ve Been Working On (Internship Experience):

• Working with AWS services (mostly – Lambda, S3, EventBridge, CloudWatch)

• Fetching data from APIs, transforming it, and storing it in MongoDB for analysis

• Built the infrastructure using Terraform

• Used GitHub Actions (YAML) to build CI/CD pipelines

• The organization I work for is a non-profit (a church), so while the work is legit, I sometimes feel it may not be taken as seriously as “corporate� experience

Certs I’ve Been Considering:

• AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate (then maybe Developer Associate or SysOps later)

• HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

• Linux Foundation Certified SysAdmin

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)

• AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional

I also started studying for the AWS Cloud Practitioner cert, but it feels a bit too basic and maybe not worth the time at this stage.

The Problem: I’m tight on time; graduating soon, working part-time, and job hunting simultaneously, hence, I don’t want to waste time on the wrong cert, therefore, I just want certifications that will actually help me stand out and showcase my DevOps/cloud skills while I’m still applying for jobs

Any advice? Which cert(s) should I prioritize right now? Anything that gives me the best value for the time invested and makes a real impact during job applications?

Really appreciate any guidance. Thanks in advance!