Should I go for a red hat cert or focus on automation skills?

[MiaJ]

I’ve been working as a sysadmin for about five years and I’m trying to figure out if getting a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) is the right move for me right now. My day-to-day is mostly maintaining our existing Linux servers, but I feel like I’m missing the deeper automation and troubleshooting skills that would let me handle more complex infrastructure projects.

[Amelia.M]

I’ve been in a similar spot for years. Maintenance is steady, but I kept bumping into automation gaps as the fleet grew. I built a small lab to test ideas: a quick Ansible play to provision a host, a script to reconcile configs, an alert that actually woke us up in time. It didn’t fix everything and it wasn’t instant value, but it gave me a sense of the kinds of problems I want to own. The certification felt useful mainly as a signal to teammates that I’m digging deeper, not a magical fix. The real win came when I could point to two concrete improvements and the time those changes saved.

[NicholasS]

Maybe the bottleneck isn’t lack of cert level or automation chops at all. It could be scope creep, legacy constraints, or the way projects are handed to you. Do you have a real project backlog you could tackle with a small automation win, or is the work mostly firefighting?

[William48]

I chased a certification once and burned weekends on mock exams, then realized the exam didn’t map to what I actually touch day to day. I kept using the same handful of shell scripts and manual checks, and the bigger projects stayed out of reach. It felt like a tease—great to have in the drawer, but no guarantee it would unlock more responsibility.

[GeorgeDL]

RHCE might be a path, but I’d test the waters by turning two recurring problems into small, measurable projects first. Pick a couple automation tasks you actually want to own and build a tiny playbook or script, then measure before and after time or error rate. If after three months you can point to real gains, go for the cert; if not, you’ll know you needed a different angle. For me, it would be a signal rather than a guarantee, at least until I see it translating to concrete projects.