IT Insights Blog — Certification Magazine

The title of this blog post, just so you know, is a trademark violation. OK, technically it probably isn't, since we aren't using said title to market a brand or sell merchandise. Since words and phrases can be trademarked, however, we'd have to license the usage of "strength in numbers" from the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association if, for example, we wanted to charge you to read our ruminations and pontifications. Or maybe we'd only be violating the trademark if the point of charging you to read this blog post were to sell oversized foam fingers, say, or t-shirts. It's complicated.

Many of you reading this already have an IT certification or two (or three, or four). If you have at least one current certification, or know someone who does, then consider today's post a call to arms. We need you. We need your IT certified friend. We need everyone who has an IT certification. More precisely we need information. Not anyone's vital statistics, or their Social Security number, or the password to their bank account. And actually, it's not we or us in the sense of TestOut Continuing Education who are doing the asking. This is the classic case of asking for a friend.

In our previous blog post, we noted that information technology employment is everywhere. IT is part of every modern business. No matter where you look, there's a role at some level of the organization for a skilled IT pro. So if you're transitioning to IT from a different career path, then you may not even need to switch employers — you may just be moving to a new department, or taking on a new job role. If you're making a clean break, on the other hand, and want to concentrate your job search on one or two different areas, then there are some places to look that are generally more fruitful than others.

The shortest distance from point A to point B is a straight line. When talking about the fastest way to get from point A to point B, things aren’t so cut and dried. For instance, if you wanted to go from Paris, France to New York City, USA in a straight line, you would have to drill a tunnel through the surface of the earth beneath the ocean. That would, of course, take longer than hopping on an airplane and flying a curved route over the Atlantic Ocean.

You have to break some eggs to make an omelet, and you have to spend some money to get a certification. Or do you? Whether or not you spend a nickel to acquire study and review materials, or take classes, or use online training tools, there's an unavoidable fee for taking a certification exam. Or is there? Our friends at Certification Magazine have been gradually releasing data from their annual Salary Survey since early February. They also conduct smaller, more targeted salary surveys throughout the year, and one item of data that turns up over and over again is that there is a fairly large portion of people who pursue and earn certifications without making any out-of-pocket investment. Zippo. Zero dollars spent. Total withdrawal from personal accounts: nada.