What this gets you toward

Two exams covering hardware, operating systems, and the practical side of support. The usual first credential for a help-desk role.

The standard first networking credential. Vendor-neutral, and the one most help-desk-to-network-engineer moves are built on.

The baseline security credential, and a DoD 8140 approved qualification — which is why it appears in so many job adverts.

Practical Linux administration, weighted toward the command line rather than theory.

A hands-on, entirely practical exam: you are given a live cluster and a terminal, and you fix things. No multiple choice at all.

The developer-facing counterpart to CKA. Also entirely hands-on, and generally considered the more approachable of the two.

A short, focused exam on infrastructure as code with Terraform. One of the quickest credentials to earn if you already use it.

A breadth-first introduction to AWS: what the services are for, how billing works, and the shared responsibility model.

The most-held cloud credential in the industry. Architecture-focused: given a requirement, choose the right services and trade-offs.

Azure's equivalent of the AWS practitioner exam. Short, inexpensive, and widely asked for in Microsoft-centric organisations.

Applied machine learning on Azure: running experiments, deploying models and monitoring them in production.

The service-management vocabulary large organisations run on. Mostly definitions and principles rather than technology.

The standard testing vocabulary credential. Widely recognised in QA and increasingly asked of developers in regulated industries.

The closest thing to an SRE certification. Built directly on Google's SRE practices — SLOs, error budgets, toil and blameless postmortems.