🎧 Why Another PM Certification Won’t Fix Your Job Search (and What Will)
Hear me when I say:
You absolutely, positively DO NOT need another PM course or certification to get hired.
In this episode, I break down why certifications feel productive during a job search, but often act as expensive and time-consuming procrastination.
I explain what hiring managers actually care about, why experience beats credentials every single time, and how focusing on the wrong gap can waste so much time.
I also walk through how to reframe your experience, even if you haven't had a formal PM title, so you can position yourself as the obvious choice for the right roles.
If you’ve been telling yourself, “I’ll start applying once I get this one certification” this is your gentle (but direct) wake-up call.
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Jess Sherlock (00:00)
I cannot think of a single where someone got feedback in their job search that...
they would have been moved forward or they would have gotten an offer if they just had XYZ certification or if they just had taken XYZ course. It's just not the thing.
They care about what you've actually done already.
Ooh, I'm fired up today. I have a hot take and it's something I've, I feel like I could do a podcast episode on probably once a month because it comes up that often. But if you're in a job search, thinking about a job search, you know, thinking about the new year, maybe a new job is in your future and you are guilty of thinking, I probably just need another certification before anybody will hire me.
Or maybe I should go take that one course so that I can start a job search. This episode is for you because, my God, I hear this from product folks all the time and I want to gently and lovingly, but directly call it what it is, procrastination. It is a usually very expensive or at least time-consuming distraction from the actual work you need to do to get hired.
Certifications are not the thing that are going to get you your next product job. It's not the thing that hiring managers care about. It is a distraction and it is procrastination from what actually matters, which is setting yourself up as the candidate, the no-brainer candidate, the obvious choice that they should hire for an open role.
Okay, let's talk about this certification trap as I call it first. maybe your brain is sounding a little bit like this. You you are starting to apply for jobs and you're not getting any interviews or you're not moving forward. And so you're starting to think, okay, why might that be? And you're starting to look for what the fix might actually be. You think, maybe I should get my CSPO certification.
Maybe I need to go get that Gen AI certification. Maybe I should go get my MBA. And that makes sense because getting a certification or taking a course feels like you're doing something. It feels comforting because it's adding structure, right? You get a syllabus, you get a timeline, you walk away with your little certificate at the end and your brain gets to feel productive and utilized.
But what you're avoiding is the emotional work, the uncomfortable work of looking at why am I actually not getting traction in my job search? And the problem most of the time is not the certification. I cannot think of a single instance in my entire career where someone got feedback in their job search that...
they would have been moved forward or they would have gotten an offer if they just had XYZ certification or if they just had taken XYZ course. It's just not the thing. And so that leads me to my second point, which is, you're probably wondering, okay, cool Jess, I got it, I got it. But what do hiring managers and recruiters actually care about?
They care about what you've actually done already.
They don't want someone who has taken a course or gotten a certification, you know and has done the thinking work to theoretically understand the skill They want folks who have practiced the skill. They want folks who have done it before they want folks who have used the skill or knowledge to actually achieve value or impact in a previous role and listen,
The hard work here is in clarifying what experience you do have, what value you do bring, what strengths you do have, and using that to tell the story of why you are a fit for the specific problems that the hiring manager or recruiter are trying to solve with an open role. And here's what I always tell people is if you put a real hiring manager, and I was one at one point, so this is my personal experience.
If you give me two candidates, or you hand me two resumes and you say, all right, go ahead and pick which person would you actually want to interview? Which person would you feel more comfortable moving forward? Let's say the first candidate has a certification and maybe a little bit of experience, you know, short term ⁓ internship or maybe a side project, okay? Candidate two has actual examples of
shipped work, meaning they've actually launched features, they've measured the impact of those features, they've collaborated with real humans, engineers, designers, stakeholders, etc. ⁓ But they don't have a certification. Every single time, I will pick the person with experience. Hands down. Every single time. And don't just take it from me. A number of years ago, I was working as a subject matter expert for product school.
And at the time, they were looking at reinventing their product leader certificate. think they were also considering whether or not it would make sense to do a kind of senior PM certification. And the question that they had was, what are hiring managers actually looking for in a senior PM? And what was really cool is I got the opportunity to go out and chat with about a dozen different hiring managers from
product-led tech companies. And question I asked each of these hiring managers was, when you're looking at a resume, what tells you whether someone is a PM or a senior PM? Or when you are interviewing someone, what are you looking for? What differentiates a PM from a senior PM? And it was so interesting. I even asked all of them directly.
a certification? Is there a course? Is an MBA enough to do And every single time, they said, it's not one thing. that's what I would encourage you to consider is when you're getting hyper-focused or a course, you know, it feels comforting. It's easy to convince yourself that, well, if I just had that one thing,
But the actuality in talking to these hiring managers is not just one thing that does it. So to kind of summarize and paraphrase, I heard things like, I want to see depth and breadth of experience. I want to see someone who has solved a lot of different problems in different contexts, at a different scope or in different size companies or at different stages of products.
Has this person done only zero-to-one products or have they done a mix of zero-to-one and then scaling? And size of teams have they worked on? What sorts of industries have they had experience in? Where do they go deep? Where do they go that's something you can kind of glean from someone's resume. But once they're interviewing someone, and I experienced this as well, I talk about this a lot with SPRINT clients, is that there's a...
Like air of confidence, there's a sense that someone is quite seasoned in terms of how they present themselves, the variety of the stories they have to tell. And I would say like how textbook their answers are. So the more junior someone tends to be, someone straight out of a certification, right? If you ask them, how do you approach roadmapping? They're gonna give you a super textbook answer, right?
I use the now next later format, the now column is for this, the next column is for that, the later column is for this. And then a more senior person is going to say, well, my answer to that question is going be, well, I've approached it in a lot of different ways. And it's going to depend on a lot of factors from the stage of the product, the size of the team, whether or not there are other product teams that we have dependencies on.
how long we're planning, like are we in a position where our roadmap is really unstable because we're super early, we haven't even gotten product market fit yet? Or are we working on a more mature product where we're thinking about roadmaps 12, 18 months out because we have much longer development cycles, lots of dependencies and significant customer releases. The point is that there's this air of confidence that you can only get putting in the work.
And so are not bad. Courses are not bad. Don't take that away from what I'm saying. just that certifications only tell someone that you sat in a class. That's it. It tells someone that you got a skill, but it doesn't signal that you can do the job, okay?
It's not about the certifications. It's, hiring managers want to see, how do you think? do you go about shipping products? How do you work with engineers and stakeholders, not just during the good times, but when things go sideways? That's the stuff that gets you hired. It's not that one certification.
So if you take nothing else away, I would say consider that you are likely looking at the wrong gap. So if you're obsessing over certifications, you're probably thinking about the wrong thing. The gap is not that you don't have the certification. The gap is that you're not talking about the skills and value that you do have. Now, we all have experienced
gaps, we all have skill gaps, job is an exercise in putting forth your strengths and your wins and your accomplishments that you have had. It's in putting forth a resume and a LinkedIn that are not generic. It's about telling a story that makes you sound like the obvious fit for the roles you're applying for. And so if you can't do those things, it's because you're missing a clear strategy.
Even the most junior person, I actually just did a job search strategy call with someone last week who's very early in their product career, but they have education and experience in data analysis and have actually been working on a product team as a product analyst. And they have lots of experience talking about their product impact as an analyst. So we could look at all the gaps and say, you should go take a PM certification. But instead, what we're saying is,
We have this person who is very motivated proven experience in data analysis that informs product roadmap decisions. They also work in specifically chargebacks in payments, which is a very niche skill set. And so we've made the choice to position them from that perspective. We're positioning them as someone you would want on your team if you want someone who can bring strong product mindset.
plus data analysis skills and a willingness to learn more of the ins and outs of running a backlog or running SPRINT ceremonies. And if you go out and look at job descriptions, you will find roles that match that. And those are the roles this person is going to be applying to. They're gonna apply to the roles where the company wants data analysis over anything else and is willing to train the person in things like SPRINT ceremonies. And by the way,
even what I told this person is, go get that course after you get the job. So if you get the job and you know that on day one, you are going to be new to SPRINT ceremonies, then by all means, go take a course to learn the ins and outs of SPRINT ceremonies or get some coaching to run effective SPRINT ceremonies. But I wouldn't do that first. I would do it once you have the opportunity at hand and you can see the value of developing that particular skill.
And you can put the course material to work on day one or I mean even in this person's case, right? If they were in a course for every moment they spend in the course they could probably apply that knowledge to the job right away. So what I mean when I say, you you're looking at the wrong gap. It's like I think we tend to hyper focus on the certification because it feels safe. It feels like I'm doing something when really the work is in saying
Let me look at the experience, accomplishments, and skills that I do have and figure out how to pitch myself based on that. So in SPRINT, what's really cool is that is where we start. You and I meet for our job search strategy call, and this is something I help every single person in SPRINT with so that we can get your positioning super sharp, we can focus your resume, you can have a strong narrative.
And then you can select the strongest interview stories to be telling when you do get those interviews. job search strategy should not just be positioning you as a generic product person, it's how do we make you the obvious choice for specific kinds of roles? That's how people get traction. That's how you do it without having to take a course or get a certification. So
Okay, so maybe you're convinced, you're like, all right, I guess I don't need a certification. I need to just package myself to be a really valuable candidate. And you might be thinking, actually don't know what my most valuable strengths and skills are. So that's a signal and that we can fix. I cannot think of a single SPRINT client who had zero value. even worked with folks who have never officially had the product management title.
but they have been doing product adjacent work, they have a lot of transferable skills. So I would say if you're not sure strengths or skills are, but you do have professional experience, that's a fixable problem and I'd be happy to fix it with you because it's the kind of problem I help folks solve all the time. As soon as we work together, we're gonna get clear on your positioning. will also by virtue of that get a sense of what your gaps are.
Your job is step one to go get the job. We can worry about gaps once you get a job, because our only job to get you your next role is in a plan that makes you the obvious choice for the right roles. here's what I want you to be thinking. So every time you have cross your mind where you're thinking, ⁓ I should just go get that one certification. I should just take that course that's going to solve everything. Here's what I want you to think to yourself instead.
have I actually done that work before or what work have I done that I could package and communicate my value and my skills and experience that I already have? I have so much to say on this topic. I would love to hear how this landed with you. Feel free to send me a DM on LinkedIn. Love to hear if this resonated or hear about how you might be changing your approach now that you got my two cents on why spending time on a certification or a course right now is probably not the best first step.
if you're stuck though and you feel like you could use some help packaging yourself in a way that's gonna be marketable and competitive for your job search, I'd love to chat. It's what we do in the SPRINT Program and it's my favorite part about the SPRINT Program and it's such a massive unlock to helping folks get way more traction, way more momentum and then ultimately land in a job that's a great fit for them where you can continue building your skills and experience. So.
You can learn more about the SPRINT program. can apply. Just go to jesssherlock.com/sprint. You can set up time so we can chat. And like I said, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn as well. I always love to hear from you. And I'll see you on the next episode of AFTER THE CERT.
