@nixCraft entry level certification is just a way of formally verifying that you were able to get a baseline level of knowledge to start learning and solidifying your understanding of that domain OJT.

Anyone treating certification as something more than this misunderstands what a certification is for.

There are certified people that are both skilled, and very unskilled. There are not-certified people in both categories as well.

Generalizations don't work here, and it's very dependent on the individual.

Also, not all certifications are created equal. On paper, I would view someone with CKA very differently from someone with AWS Cloud Practitioner, for example....but then I would confirm any of those hunches by actually talking to the person.

The cert would be one, small, potential positive as I attempt to learn more about what this person may be skilled in.

But if I talk to them, and their experience doesn't back it up, then the cert isn't going to magically make me ignore their lack of real world competence.