Can Certification Make a Difference? (continued)
Matters of Concern
IT workers remain steadfastly concerned about certification. According to results of a biannual survey of more than 1,000 IT workers, just released by tech career site Dice, 82 percent of tech professionals cite the ability to keep their skills up-to-date as a strong area of concern. Further, when asked to assess their employer's encouragement and support of skills development, one-third of tech professionals say it is only "fair" or "poor." Only 26 percent rated their employers' performance in this area as "excellent," with 40 percent of respondents rating it as "good."
"Certification is important still,'' says Paul Melde, vice president of technology at Dice, which is based in Des Moines, Iowa. "I'm not sure if the criticality of a few years ago was really as critical as we all thought it was, but I think it's a great way to demonstrate a basic competence in a technology."
A Competitive Issue
Certification has to be backed up with demonstrable work experience, Melde adds. Dice gets a lot of job postings specifying certifications, especially in contract positions, he says. Some of the ones that routinely come up are Microsoft certified engineers (MSCE), Cisco certification (CCIE) and project management certification (PMP), he says.
In terms of pay, "With certification coupled with experience, it would keep you at the upper end of what the market is in your area,'' Melde says. "The ongoing education it represents gets back to what tech professionals were discussing in the survey -- keeping skills up to date."
Yet, Foote's research shows that in the last 12 months, pay for non-certified skills is up an average of seven percent, while in the same period, the average pay for certified skills is down 1.2 percent. Non-certified skills may include application development, networking and operating systems. Certified skills include IT security, Web development, and database management, Foote says.
"What's interesting is we have not seen, on a quarterly basis, certification losing value since 2004. So, it's a big deal that for first time in two years in this last quarter, certification skills are negative numbers; they're going in the other direction,'' Foote says. (article continues)
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