By Amy Ashby, FinOps Lead, Under Armour
I have been in technology for more than 20 years. Much of that time I’ve held technical roles, and for the last 6 years, I’ve been doing FinOps either part time or full time. I joined the FinOps Foundation in 2020 and quickly found a place where there were others doing the same thing! I obtained FinOps Certified Practitioner shortly after and when the FinOps Certified Professional course was created, I quickly added it to my list of professional goals.
The FinOps Professional Certification isn’t just a test. There is meaningful engagement with others in the cohort and other contributions to give back to the community and help others find their way. The required sessions with other members of my cohort were really great.
Getting people into groups with a business case and collaborating is beneficial in many ways. I found it interesting talking with people in different size organizations that deal with different levels of scale and how they think about solving problems or what parts of the framework/capabilities were higher priority than others.
It’s interesting that even though our backgrounds were varied, in the end, we still spoke a common language and could relate. So even though we had never met before and were grouped together to work on the business case tasks, conversation and ideas flowed because we all drew from our experiences.
Having access to a variety of community practitioners was incredibly valuable during these sessions as there were different people and we all had very different FinOps backgrounds. You always get to learn something new in situations like that!
The self-paced training modules were effective. I especially enjoyed the ones that are more conversational and felt more like interviews with people. Getting involved with content and service contributions as part of the program has also widened my network and I’ve been able to meet some really smart people along the way.If you’re looking to validate your knowledge, learn something new, contribute to the community and meet new people – the FinOps Certified Professional course is well worth the effort!
Not only will you obtain a new certification, but you’ll get to be part of the bigger community and have access to a wealth of collective knowledge and experiences that you won’t find anywhere else.