IT certification planning

Check out Anne Martinez’ “CertiBlog”

Anne Martinez is the brains and voice behind one of my favorite IT certification Web sites. It’s called GoCertify, and you’ll find that it’s home to regular certification news and information. Better yet, it includes a peachy certification database called Certification Quick Find where you can search for, slice, and dice IT certification to your heart’s content, or until the cows come home — whichever comes first. There’s another entry point into this same data available at SearchCertify as well.

Just recently, Anne started to blog at GoCertify, and approached me to do an occasional guest slot for her. Never one to skip a quid pro quo, I replied to her “I’ll blog for you, if you’ll blog for me!” Thus, if all goes as planned, you’ll get a chance to hear her opinions and information right here in this blog from time to time, as well as to see me expostulate and pontificate on her blog as well. Check out my recent comment there to a recruiter looking for an infosec analyst in the Nashville, TN area, for example.

Check out the new Certiblog

But if you have certification questions, comments, or issues, I hope you’ll also share them here with me as well. I’m always answering queries on the IT Knowledge Exchange “Ask the Expert” message boards, and I get plenty of fodder for this blog from those interactions as well as from your comments here. Please keep ‘em coming!

Best,

–Ed–

Does Certification Help? Some interesting numbers to ponder…

A perennial question among IT job seekers might be succinctly summarized as “Does certification help?” Anne Martinez and the crew at GoCertify.com posted an interesting set of numbers in January, 2009 that tally the job postings at Dice.com and Monster.com that make mention of specific credentials. These include MCSE, MCITP, CISA, CISM, CISSP, CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE, Citrix CCA, CompTIA A+, RHCE, PMP, and GIAC (which lumps a large number of certs under a single category).

This article is entitled “Job Openings for the Certified,” and offers some interesting opportunities for observation and analysis. Despite its advancing decrepitude, the MCSE still leads the pack (M:839; D:1050, where M = Monster, and D = Dice). Other heavy hitters include the CCNA (M:566; D:751), CISSP (M:496; D:722), and PMP (M:572; D:1106). Of course, it’s not always clear that possessing the certifications in question is all it takes to get a job that asks for such credentials, but it’s at least an indication that some employers find them valuable enough to include them in their required or desired characteristics when describing open positions.

But as the GoCertify article itself concludes “Certification is a capstone to your skill set, not a replacement for skills that you must also have.” As I’ve said in this blog many times, the most important things about finding work include not just your milestone achievements (degrees, certs, honors, and so forth) but what you can do, what problems you can (and have) solved, and what skills you can bring to work with you when you walk in the door.