Why Your Certificates Don’t Matter (And What Actually Does)

A lot of developers believe certifications are a meaningful lever for getting hired internationally.

They are not.

Hear me out.

Certificates can help you pass an automated screen. They signal you’ve invested time in learning. But once a human is involved, once someone is actually deciding whether to hire you, they rarely move the decision in the way people think they do.

What moves the decision is simpler, and harder: how you show up, and how you operate.

And those are not the same as “more credentials”.

The Nairobi moment

Last week I was in Nairobi for the Africa Tech Summit. We organized a side event through Tunga Academy on landing international tech jobs. The response was overwhelming: we had to close registration at 450 people.

The room was packed. Mix of junior, mid-level, and senior developers. Most had never worked for an international client.

During the panel discussion – myself, Timothy Maenda from StartHub, and Irene Mwangi from Power Learn Project – I brought up something that comes up regularly in our conversations with developers.

Certifications.

“In real hiring decisions,” I said, “I’ve almost never seen a certificate make the difference. Neither have my clients”. All three of us were unanimous. But the room struggled to accept it.

Someone asked: “Then why is it always listed in job descriptions?” (my answer: “Out of habit”)

This moment has stayed with me because it reveals something bigger. Developers are investing enormous energy in the wrong places. Not because they’re foolish (they’re anything but). But because they can’t see what the hiring side actually focuses on.

What we actually look for at Tunga

When we evaluate candidates for international roles, we’re trying to answer two practical questions fast.

1) How do you show up?

Not as a personality assessment. As signal quality.

Can I quickly understand who I’m dealing with? Can you communicate like someone who has thought about the other side of the screen?

At the Nairobi session, we put a few LinkedIn profiles on the screen, volunteers from the audience. One had a photo, but the person was standing too far away. “I can’t see who you are,” I said. There was not a clear signal of intent, context, or seriousness about the role they were seeking.

People recognized it immediately. Some uncomfortable laughter.

The point isn’t grooming or polish. The point is awareness. Remote work is mostly communication. If your primary professional surface doesn’t communicate clearly, you are losing points before anyone has even spoken to you.

2) How do you operate?

This is what we generally – though perhaps incorrectly – call “soft skills”.

It’s not soft. It’s delivery.

Can you find your own work when things get quiet? Can you surface blockers early, clearly, and with options? Can you manage expectations without waiting to be asked? Can you ask good questions when context is missing?

Here’s an example from Tunga’s everyday practice: the client says their developer isn’t productive enough. At the same time, the developer is frustrated because they don’t have enough work.

What’s happening is usually not laziness or incompetence. It’s a mismatch of assumptions.

The client expects the developer to proactively identify tasks, ask questions, create clarity. The developer expects the manager to assign work when there’s more to do.

Both make sense inside their own frames. But in a distributed environment, those frames collide. And the collision looks like underperformance on the part of the developer.

In international teams, taking initiative is not a bonus. It is expected.

Why this gap exists

Problem-solving is a skill. Like any skill, it requires repetition. And repetition depends on your training environment.

I learned this partly through a football academy project in Uganda. Ugandan coaches kept asking: why don’t more of our talented players make it to European leagues? European clubs want players who make autonomous decisions under pressure, in real time. That ability is trained through practice.

But in Africa, in many educational contexts (both in schools and at home) the pedagogical culture tends to be hierarchical. Initiative is regularly penalized instead of encouraged. Taking risks and making mistakes often isn’t safe. The result is less practice in autonomous decision-making.

The same pattern shows up regularly in candidates wanting to join our platform: strong technical competence, but weaker autonomy in collaboration.

This isn’t permanent. But it is what needs addressing. That’s why we started Tunga Academy.

The market paradox

Eleven years ago when we started Tunga, there was a shortage of strong developers across Africa. Today, the situation has flipped.

The talent pool has grown enormously. But local job markets haven’t kept pace. The promise many developers heard – “learn to code, get a well-paid job” – runs into the reality of limited local demand.

So the pull toward international work grows. And international opportunities do exist. European and North American companies are looking for exactly the technical talent Africa produces.

But the barrier is rarely technical skill. It’s whether people can operate in the collaboration model those teams assume.

If anything, that barrier is becoming more important. As AI handles more standardized technical work, what scales in value is judgment, clarity, initiative, expectation management. The human mechanics.

Where to invest your energy

This is where most developers can make a practical shift.

Less time optimizing for credentials as an end in themselves. More time building stronger self-presentation and stronger operating behavior.

Concretely, that means:

• Communication skills: Learn to manage expectations clearly. Practice giving and receiving feedback. Develop the ability to ask precise questions when context is missing.
  
  
• Assertiveness training: Build comfort with speaking up, challenging assumptions respectfully, and advocating for what you need to do your work well.
  
  
• Problem-solving practice: Work on real projects where you have to make decisions with incomplete information. Contribute to open source. Build something yourself.
  
  
• Professional visibility: Improve how you present your work. Document your thinking. Show your process, not just your output.

Certificates can sit somewhere in that picture. But they’re not the lever.

What we do at Tunga Academy

We learned in hospitality how to see across frames and anticipate friction. Tunga Academy applies that: our job is to help people build the signals and behaviors that international teams actually respond to.

Problem-based development, not theory-first. No promises of jobs. Just ruthless clarity about what moves the needle, and structured practice around that. This is why our assertiveness training, for example, has become unexpectedly popular: it fills a gap people feel but can’t always name.

Closing the gap

Standing in that room in Nairobi, I could see both frustration and hope. These developers have worked hard to get where they are.

But the obstacle isn’t what they think it is.

Once you can see that certificates matter less than communication, that grinding technical skills matters less than initiative, the path becomes clearer.

The talent is real. The opportunities are real. What’s needed is seeing what’s actually in the way. That gap is closeable, and now let’s close it!