GitHub Fundamentals Certification

When I started this blog, I chose to host it as a GitHub Pages. It would have been much easier for me to pick WordPress or Substack, but GitHub Pages gives me an excuse to try and interact more with Git, GitHub, and Markdown. Since then, I took the SANS 540 Cloud Security and DevSecOps Automation course, which really throws you into the deep end of that world. It was a great course and I wrote a little bit about it previously.

At the start of 2024, GitHub actually released four certifications of its own: Foundations, Actions, Advanced Security, and Administration. Later, they added a certification for GitHub Copilot. They also lowered the cost of the Foundations exam and made it so you had to use their secure testing software but did not have to schedule it with a proctor.

I was looking at something else GitHub-related and was going through one of the modules on the free Learning Plan path. I thought I would actually finish the remaining modules and see if I could pass the exam. The learning modules’ content is quite good, forcing me to look at parts of GitHub that I hadn’t tried yet. Each module has hands-on components you can use with your GitHub account. This blog post also has a nice all-in-one spot for the topics covered.

I’m happy to share that I passed the foundations exam. I haven’t seen this certification discussed too frequently, and I don’t think having this on your resume is going to have recruiters knocking down your door. However, I think having those fundamental skills and leveraging and participating in projects hosted on GitHub will be needed. John Lambert has a nice blog, “The Githubification of Infosec”, which has some examples.