Any certification that includes Certificates (no not the piece of paper the technical kind)?

Hi,

I have about 23 years in the field now as a Windows guy. Unfortunately, at every turn I am being asked to perform tasks using certificates. I know nothing about certs.

This kind:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRMBZhdFjDI

I can watch these videos but they are not sticking. Even if I start to pick up a freckle of what they are, I find myself discouraged when I am tasked to perform varying tasks with them.

Any certs out there that covers these? Sure I can watch videos, etc but I feel that I do have some learning and comprehension disabilities along with ADHD.

I figure if I might as will just add another certificate to my belt (the other type lol) to the alphabet soup that keeps me working if I am going to learn more.

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

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Comments

gettinold

Nothing? Guess I have to learn this stuff on the job?

JDMurray

I think the statement "perform tasks using certificates" has me thinking of digital certificates rather than human training certifications.

gettinold

That is exactly it.

JDMurray

I suggest that you find out from your IT department who your approved digital certificate provider(s) is and read their documentation for how to request and use their digital certs.

UnixGuy

I dont know if there is a certification that address this, but the question is why? Why do you want to learn and practice this through a certification?

Why not setup a lab and go through the guides/Google/Documentation and practice it on your own? seems a lot quicker this way

E Double U

UnixGuy said:

Why do you want to learn and practice this through a certification?

Because the TE crowd is at all about certs

FluffyBunny

gettinold said:

Unfortunately, at every turn I am being asked to perform tasks using certificates. I know nothing about certs.

Right! Now you're talking my kind of party!

PKI and certificates are my favorite hobby! I even run two in-house classes for our engineers and colleagues: one about the fundamentals of crypto and certs (why, what, how, when) and the other more technically in-depth about how our engineers are supposed to automated the process of managing these certificates in their CI/CD pipelines.

From time to time I teach that intro class to people on the CertStation and /r/comptia Discord servers. If you like we can set something up, so I can run you through the basics

https://discord.gg/dfZmfCH7
https://discord.gg/zETr7YUJ

As to official trainings etc. you will not find exactly what you're looking for.

* Security+ covers the fundamentals I also cover, but probably a bit less.
* CISSP covers the fundamentals I also cover in my class.
* Mark Cooper "the PKI guy!" has great in-depth trainings on running a PKI
* Venafi said they had a nice article explaining how to learn this, but they don't.

* There's other vendors who offer generic PKI trainings, or product-focused trainings (Thales, other HSMs and so)

There's nothing that really explains to a devops engineer: this is what crypto is, this is what certs are, this is what you have to do with them... Which is why I made those in-house trainings.

Otherwise, the best way is as you said: on the job, making it work by reading documentation.

UnixGuy

@FluffyBunny sounds like an awesome class! There is definitely a gap in this area