Not sure about the end value of certifications, for me it just makes it easier to hold myself accountable and take time out to learn about something in depth that I won’t do otherwise.

I mostly use them for books and certifications.

This video covers a bunch of basics of internals for BQ: www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOZa...

In addition to templates, for dbt we use pre-commit with dbt-checkpoint, where you can add a lot of those column name/type checks, test requirements etc.