According to a recent report published in NetworkWorld magazine, a survey of 700 network professionals found that 60% landed a new job and 50% earned more with IT certifications.
University of Houston-Clear Lake, 2013
Case closed then, right? But also it’s back in the day when “70 percent [of job postings] require a bachelor degree, 85 require experience, and about 14 percent require some sort of certification”. That was a tight market, and we all know that 14% might actually be a 5% hard requirement in practice. Regardless, it seems certs have monetary value, well for network professionals, in 2013. Does that distinction mean anything?
A report found that almost 90% of hiring managers would prioritize cert holder applicants. Said the company selling courses. After 3 years of course the report is not accessible anymore, only the articles referring to it. And oh boi, they do refer to it.
What’s the point of getting certified?
According to Indeed.com, it’s getting validation (you know, fighting impostor syndrome), and improving your resume.
I do agree, it is a sign that you still care to improve, but I’d argue it’s the best one at that. Let’s review the monetary value beyond self-improvement through some of the most popular certifications.
Project Management Professional (PMP)
According to the company giving this cert, you can get up to 56% more salary than without it.
There are a few problems with that.
the low end is negative, so then sometimes getting the cert yields a lower salary? Only if this table is a reliable metric for that.
20% were non-PMP holders, which for smaller datasets means a few dozens of people
PMP median correlates to the PMP 5–10 years experience column (ofc as everything, it’s inconsistent through the rows), so we can assume most PMP holders are experienced professionals. we know nothing about non-PMP tenure.
higher salary might as well correlate to longer experience by this data
To be fair, measuring the benefits of certifications is not an easy task. What I’d be looking for is comparing similar specialty, and similar experience, at similar company sizes.
Certified ScrumMaster
This is another popular certificate in the IT sector. According to Forbes the benefits of getting it include a better resume, and building your skillset. Very specific. This highlights the other problem I found while researching popular certs: all articles throw around claims of improvement with none of the data specifically supporting certs themselves. CSM was a bit different though.
GlassDoor has data for both certified and uncertified ScrumMasters. We don’t know anything about the company sizes, but we have the other two criteria matched, and we can compare them.
So there are some certs that on average are worth it, and some that are less likely to be?
General comparison
The best I could find was an article with Foote Partners’ data about ~600 uncertified skills and ~600 certified skills.
By this, we can track uncertified skills such as JavaScript, Angular, Spring, Java and certified ones like Oracle, Microsoft, AWS, and so on. For a complete list see their site. This is a useful comparison as this is an almost representative survey. The only thing it’s lacking is the equivalent tenure levels to compare, but it makes up for it with the fact that it’s not just a snapshot it’s a timeline. We can see the trend of learning new skills paying out more than a certificate. Does that mean certs aren’t worth it? NO. There are exceptions, like devops and security certs that are on a way higher premium, or Certified ScrumMaster for that matter as we saw. But on average,
learning marketable skills is definitely recommended to get better positions and a higher salary, apart from self-validation. If it ends with a certificate, that does not hurt either, but right now skills are more valuable than certs. On average.
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