Linux

I'm currently on the RHCSA path myself, and I can tell you that the courses are not worth the thousands that Red Hat charges. There are plenty of unofficial video courses on YouTube and Udemy and study guides and practice tests on GitHub that are free or cheap, and other resources for every individual study topic, which will be good enough.

However, though I can't speak from experience, it seems like the cert itself will look good enough on a resume to justify the investment of $500 and a month of studying.

The only people I have known with certs didn't have educations. Generally, the fewer degrees, the more certs. There are exceptions.

If you have a PhD or Masters, then certifications are unlikely worth it.

If you don't have a Bachelors, then certs are critical. Many jobs will just reject you.

A Bachelors is where certs seem to do the most good.

All of this in my part of the USA (Midwest and West) and speciality (HPC). I have been involved in hiring in several organizations.

Is it something you cannot learn by yourself or the certification is valuable for your career?

Depends on your end goal, don't pay for yourself. Tech is hard to break into, certificates can help elevate your resume when you do not have a network to leverage. It's often good to "top off" your resume when market trends shift and you are lacking experience. For instance right now AWS certificates are likely strong additions if you don't have any cloud background. My rhcsa helped get my first job and is a positive for legacy LAMP and java shops. Trending forward: you will primarily be using it to support Linux based docker containers and a lot of the networking and hardware configuration will be obfuscated away. There is a non-zero amount of file ownership and user groups; but existing organizations will have figured that out already.

If it's free, why not.

Will it help you get a job? I've never hired anyone based on a certification, because it doesn't mean experience. Experience is what gets people hired.

Doctors don't get hired without first doing a residency. Mechanics don't get hired because they know all the parts on a car. And I won't get hired by a law firm for simply scoring 99% on an LSAT.

Like some other replies said, it probably won't get you a job by itself. But it may get you the interview if it's the distinguishing factor between you and an equivalent candidate.

I got RHCSA (and later RHCE), and I think they were worthwhile. On cost, I would not go out of pocket for the Red Hat training if that's the bundle you're referring to. That stuff is priced for people that are being funded by their companies. Personally, I did self-study using Sander van Vugt's materials. He has both books and videos for RHCSA, depending on your learning style. I found them to be excellent preparation for the exam.

My employer paid for a course heavily based on it (No cert, but condensed and more useful), and for my time. One tutor and two pupils over a week.

I found it moderately interesting, and slightly useful. It was the most relevant training available for administrating our (then) CentOS 5/6/7 servers. There were bits that didn't transfer across to CentOS, mostly the proprietary RHEL software aspects which we largely skipped. There was much that was useful for any linux distro.

Highlight for me was properly learning awk during it - I still use that every day.

It depends on what you’re getting it for and why. Also, never pay for training and certifications, especially the pricey ones. It should be your employer paying for it.

Is the RHCSA worth it?

I don't know. What's the RHCSA? Let's check the description. Maybe they'll explain.

See title

Hmm... :/