Support / IT Ops certifications (2026): what shows up in job ads and when it helps

In Support / IT Ops roles (support engineer, sysadmin, IT support), certifications usually act as a fundamentals signal:

• networking (routing, DNS, troubleshooting),
• sysadmin basics (Linux/Windows, permissions, hardening),
• processes (incident/problem/change management).

What matters most in practice is fast diagnosis and clear communication. A certification only helps if you can back it up with examples.

TL;DR

• Start with certifications explicitly mentioned in job ads (don’t assume).
• Pick one certification that closes your biggest gap (networking or ops processes).
• Pair it with a small lab project: troubleshooting scenarios + runbooks + short postmortems.

What certifications show up in job ads (from active listings)

The list below is built from explicit mentions in Support / IT Ops listings on the platform.

How to choose (by role)

Customer-facing support

Strong signals tend to be:

• clear communication (how you ask questions and confirm hypotheses),
• troubleshooting skill (logs, reproducibility),
• smart escalation (what you send to engineering and how).

Sysadmin / IT Ops

Strong signals tend to be:

• Linux fundamentals (permissions, services, logs),
• networking basics (DNS, routing, firewall),
• standardization (runbooks, baseline configs),
• controlled change (change management).

Projects that validate it

A small lab can be very effective:

• a local/VM setup with 2–3 services,
• incident scenarios (DNS broken, cert expired, disk full),
• runbooks (“how to verify”, “how to fix”, “how to prevent”),
• a short postmortem per incident (impact + root cause + action items).

These are exactly the kind of artifacts that stand out in interviews.

Common mistakes

• Certifications without examples: interviews reveal that quickly.
• “I know networking” without troubleshooting: show your investigation approach (dig, traceroute, logs).
• “I know ITIL” without scenarios: prepare concrete incident/change stories and decisions.

A simple runbook structure (that interviews love)

1. Symptoms: how you know it’s an incident (metrics/logs/user reports).
2. Quick checks: 3–5 steps (DNS, connectivity, disk, certs, auth).
3. Fix: clear remediation steps + rollback when relevant.
4. Escalation: what you send (timeline, logs, impact, hypothesis).
5. Prevention: what you change to avoid repeats (monitoring, alerts, config).

Quick troubleshooting checklist (networking / ops)

• Can you explain DNS vs routing issues and how you distinguish them?
• Can you trace a request end-to-end (client → LB → service → DB)?
• Can you identify “disk full / memory pressure / cert expired” from symptoms?
• Can you write a short postmortem (impact, root cause, action items)?

What to put on your CV (so it’s easy to evaluate)

• 2–3 incident examples (symptoms → steps → outcome) and what you changed afterward.
• 1–2 tools you’re comfortable with (monitoring, ticketing, scripting) and how you used them.
• One documentation/runbook example you created (and how it helped the team).

How the list is built (short)

• Scans title + description of Support / IT Ops jobs on the platform.
• Counts explicit certification mentions only (codes/names), not general technologies.
• Shows how many listings mention each certification within a recent window.

Next steps

• Support / IT Ops jobs: /ro/cariere-it/rol/support-engineer
• Support / IT Ops CV template: /ro/ghiduri/model-cv-support-it-romania