Most of what I learned about the Wolfram Language was through online courses offered at Wolfram-U, a number of books, the Community and StackExchange and the many webinars Wolfram offers. Recently, I completed the Daily Study Group: A Guide to Programming and Mathematics with the Wolfram Language. The certification experience helped me structure and fill in gaps in my knowledge and ask questions about topics I was still struggling with. In addition, the certification process helped me better gauge my proficiency level. I appreciated the structure of the quizzes; the first two were meant to verify my basic understanding of WL concepts and the third required me to code a solution for a specific problem.
I recommend a separate post on the second question as there are many aspects to it. This is my personal perspective on your second question. During my studies at university, Mathematica was already a well-established platform for computational Algebra, and I think it still is for many academic careers. Outside academia, many employers still require established and popular languages, platforms and methods. Functional programming is catching up, so time will tell. However, I am sure the WL as a computational toolbox will help many of us in their jobs to do things faster, better or in more flexible ways. I am thinking of independent consultants and researchers, freelancers, small firms, but I am also aware that Financial Research Dept. and firms are using it too.
The process of certification employed in the Daily Study group was user-friendly enough. I miss a number of aspects though: one is an indication of course load / credits. The other one is a page (maybe in your personal profile page) with an overview of courses completed with dates, workload/credits, certificates and scores. The Daily Study Group Quizzes were automatically graded, and submitted to Wolfram-U, but there is no feedback in the process which led to many questions whether or not the results were received and to additional work for the Wolfram-U staff, I am sure. It would have been beneficial if the results were confirmed and summarized once received by Wolfram-U.
Certifications on the Community pages may encourage others to get certifications as well. I would use it on my Community Profile. On LinkedIn it may be a good option for some people, depending on where they are and where they want to go in their career.
