TestOut Around the World: Certs Making a Difference in Colombia
Posted by TestOut Staff on
In 2014 TestOut partnered with private companies and universities in Panama and Colombia to provide our training courses. TestOut has trained thousands of English speaking students, and knew we could help non-English speakers as well. We had to revamp our courses, naturally, to make them 100 percent localized to those new countries. Translating and recording all the videos and lab simulations is a big undertaking, and during the past 18 months we’ve made some terrific strides. TestOut presently offers PC Pro (80 percent of the course is currently in Spanish, with a complete Spanish update due in the second quarter of this year), and Office Pro, which is 100 percent localized in Spanish. We are also offering fully localized Portuguese versions of Office Pro, PC Pro and Network Pro for Brazil.
I know that, in the United States, an IT certification makes a positive difference in salary among IT pros with the same number of years on the job. More companies are now recognizing the value of certifications in addition to formal degrees, and more universities are including certs in their formal degree programs. Naturally I was a bit curious as to what sort of salary impact an IT cert might having in America’s neighboring Latin American nations.
I got in touch with Rasgos & Perfiles, an HR consulting firm in Colombia, and we put together a quick self-reported survey of 40 IT graduates from Corporacion Unificada Nacional de Educacion Superior (CUN) in Colombia. While every graduate had a degree, not every graduate had an IT certification. Note: Our survey was anything but scientific, we just wanted to get an idea of what impact IT certifications are having.
The graduates in our survey all had one of three degree types:
Technical (12-to-18 months to complete)
Associate (2-to-3 years to complete)
Professional (4-to-5 years to complete)
The big takeaway was that, for IT pros with the same number of years on the job, the average monthly income for an individual who has both an IT degree and a certification is 24.1 percent greater than that of an individual with just a degree.
We know this is just an exploratory survey, but it does show a similar pattern to what many have observed in the United States. We are so excited to see these results that we will be doing a larger, more scientific survey in the future. But for now, it’s nice to know that TestOut courseware is helping IT pros in other countries to earn more money.
About the Author — Giovanni Riveros is a member of TestOut Corporation’s International Business Development Team. A native of Colombia, Giovanni has a bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology and is currently completing a master’s degree in City Planning at the University of Utah.