As for me personally, I think, that Confluent certification program lacks a learning and certification path for people who don’t really implement their own Kafka Producers and Consumers on everyday basis, but who mainly use Kafka to integrate external systems with each other to build a Data Mesh architecture or something similar, using Kafka Cluster as the integration layer in this ecosystem.
These people are often not Java Developers, but Database / BigData Specialists instead (including myself).
So, I think something like Confluent Certified Integration Expert for Apache Kafka or Confluent Certified Data Mesh Developer for Apache Kafka would be really beneficial for them. This certification could cover such topics as:
- Kafka and Data Mesh architecture
- Kafka for ETL/data ingesting and related use-cases
- Kafka Connect concepts and architecture
- Kafka Connect monitoring and troubleshooting (REST API for troubleshooting, logs, JMX metrics, etc…)
- Most common connectors overview and use-cases (source and sink)
- Single Message Transformations (SMTs) - standard, most common third-party and how to implement your own (overview)
- How to implement your own connector (overview)
- Kafka Connect security
- KSQL for “in-kafka” data transformation, filtration and cleansing
- Design decisions (CDCs, dealing with transactional data / normalized data / hierarchical data including nested arrays, envelopping data, schema management / evolution / compatibility, datatypes mappings, etc…)
- …