Certifications have always been irrelevant for me, but that's only because my goal has always been what I'm capable of doing on my own AND (this one is a biggie) I was unbelievably fortunate to have several people in my career who trusted that I could get the job done.

Certifications are about low trust. With the advent of modern LLM tech, trust levels are probably not going up.

Nobody needs to hire someone who can use an LLM because if that is the skill they're looking for they can just use the LLM themselves.

So if you need to hire someone because the LLM isn't cutting it, then you'll by definition need to be hiring someone who isn't using an LLM. Someone who isn't just using an LLM to make you think that they aren't using an LLM.

How is that going to be done? Sounds like a job for certifications to me. Not today's certifications, but a much more in depth, in person, and gatekeepery certification.

My guess would be that certifications, unfortunately, will be significantly more relevant in the days of LLMs. Not less.

Isn't that what the CPA and Bar exams, to use US analogs, do? They are an in-depth test or sets of tests that prove a person has a useful set of knowledge in a given domain.

I don’t think it will be too long before the pendulum swings back towards “real people who actually know the subject”. At that point, I might feel bad for everyone who coasted on AI.

The damage has already been done.

Much like how if you stop going gym you lose muscle mass, the same happens with knowledge and understanding with the brain.

People who have learned how to learn can learn more. People who only used AI never learned how to learn.

Using AI is a different skill set that allows you to dive into topics that you otherwise aren’t ready for. I just used it to do a task that would have taken me a couple days of reading up on a different software system that I wasn’t already familiar. Now I have no need to ever really know that system, is that a good thing or not? I don’t know yet. But I had to know lots of basics about how those systems work in general to get the AI to do the thing I wanted, snd it wasn’t a one shot prompt, rather it was an iterative prompt process.

I touch LaTeX once every 10 years. I'm not going to learn it because I'm not fond of debugging macro processors and have never had a good experience with the language where you have to invoke a stew of packages that will mysteriously stomp on each other. I generated a script the other day to prepare a document in the format I needed. It mostly worked, but the LLM also stumbled on the packages until I could coax a working solution out of it. They're good for these problems where you only need shallow knowledge.

Most of us who touch latex make our one great template and forget it, or at least we try to just work off what is given to us.

You still need "knowledge" to use AI, but AI can handle details. Students relying on AI to pass classes means they might not ever obtain the knowledge they really need to use AI well, or maybe I'm cynical and they actually learn the cursory knowledge they need to use AI during the test because otherwise they wouldn't be able to use AI.

I hope there are at least some classes on using AI to solve problems though, like in a domain. "Using AI to boost programming" should be a CS course at least that you can take after you learn programming the manual way.

Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.

Accounting exams are gatekeeping, yes. The good kind of gatekeeping where you make sure the people doing the job are actually capable. And you have avenues to punish those who fail their clients.

> This also applies to universities

Eh. I’d say the actual academics are about 1/3 of the university experience. The rest is networking and teaching you how to think and solve problems on a more abstract level. I’d say the people who farm that (and particularly the abstract thinking part) out to AI are going to be the ones left at disadvantage in the future. You’re completely replaceable.

> Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.

For exams and other tutorial like material* the LLMs have enough public training data for it to be good enough.

* all those vibe coded apps that are 95% boilerplate.

I’m not talking about AI passing the exam, I’m talking about AI doing the actual job the exam qualifies you for.

That ain't going to happen with LLMs.

And no one is financing anything but LLMs at the moment.

At the end of the day the job market will correct itself accordingly which is what most people who bother going to university or collecting any certificate care about. And right now it is already looking bleak. https://accountancyage.com/2025/09/29/pwcs-graduate-glow-up-...

Might be time we start adapting the pipeline into employment and start revising the importance of some of these gatekeepers before more people fall into unnecessary debt.

I've had no end of problems with accountants regardless of their certifications, they operate in a domain with an incoherent body of contradictory and highly subjective rules yet make it out to be a science.

My conclusion as a whole is that accountancy as a profession rarely delivers any actual value to their customers, where much of the job is compliance theater at best.

Accounting is a PvP profession. It's you against the taxman and others who want to issue fines etc.

One of the main issues I had when I took accounting was that you often couldn't figure out things from first principles because the "right" way was whatever the relevant financial accounting standards board said it was. But following that standard is what companies need to do--and therefore has value--even if it's arguably arbitrary (within some general framework).

Yeah ... that's kind of the point. The money doesn't exist, but the violence people will use if their money is misappropriated is very real. Accounting is loophole patch stacked on loophole patch for thousands and thousands of years.

It's not intellectually enriching, but like it has the weight of society going back forever with dire consequences when it fails. That's not nothing even if it's boring from a technological point of view.

I think of it sort of like git. Technically, any sort of distributed version control would have served our industry just fine. Git didn't need to win, but things are vastly simplified having basically one version control framework to rule them all.

I don’t really agree with this. Sure there are standards but there are underlying first principles with some quirks to make things balance.

I'm not sure we really disagree. Sure, there are foundational principles but how to handle non-routine transactions aren't necessarily at all obvious.

This conclusion makes as much sense as saying software delivers no value because you've never personally seen an app without bugs