Do certifications matter ?
Looking to improve my prospects of being contacted by recruiter or give general credibility to hiring managers due to lack of experience. Would industry certifications (AWS, SQL, Tableau) matter?
A public portfolio of personal work is more appealing to hiring managers, if you don’t have much experience in an area.
Yes, but to a very limited extent. They won't automatically make your resume perfect, but, for example, if someone has a PMP I can assume with fairly high probability he's not a complete and hopeless idiot.
They can help get your foot in the door for entry to mid level positions, and distinguish you from other candidates if everything else is common to the next candidate. But I'd say experience (proven track record and mastery of your area) can trump the lack of a certification any day.... unless the hiring company is under some legal or contractual agreement that you must be certified/licensed to perform some task, which is rare.
Not too rare. You need MS certs to get and maintain MS partner status.
Yes, they exist but relative to the sum number of possible tech jobs out there, Microsoft Partner is pretty miniscule.
Depends on what you’re going for. If you want an IT/Solutions Architect job, then ya maybe. Software Engineering? No. Just LeetCode boi