IT jobs: Certification doesn’t pay
In a trend reversal that first emerged in late 2000, salaries for noncertified IT workers now average more than pay for workers with IT certifications, according to Foote Partners’ quarterly IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, which monitors salaries of 74,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.
“The corner has officially been turned for IT professionals who choose to market the diversity of their talents, not just their technical skills,” said the 23-page report by Foote Partners, a Vero Beach, Fla.-based IT workforce research firm.
“IT jobs have changed substantially in eight years. In another few decades, the IT organization as we know it today will be hard to find, and so will entire segments of IT jobs. The hurt that has been put on the marketplace reputation of skill certifications is only a drop in the pond of fundamental changes that will reform or destroy dozens of long-held IT industry conventions, beliefs and rituals,” said the firm’s co-founder, CEO and Chief Research Officer David Foote in a statement.
On a more extreme note, I recently wrote about an analyst who said IT department jobs may one day be obsolete because users are becoming more self-reliant.
While I don’t agree with this prediction, it is clear that the scope of IT careers is changing. It seems the biggest issue now is whether students who earn degrees in computer science are learning skills that translate into real-world data center jobs.
For instance, 29-year-old Aaron Sawchuk, CTO of Marlborough, Mass.-based ColoSpace explained how he went to Middlebury College in Vermont with the intention of earning a degree in computer science but switched his major to economics because his studies didn’t pertain to relevant technologies. The IT skills he needed to found ColoSpace he learned on his own.
According to a report from the American Electronics Association (AeA), 118,500 jobs were added to the U.S. high-tech industry between January and June of 2007, bringing the total to 5.94 million jobs. Even so, there is a clear shortage of skilled IT workers to fill those openings.
I am interested in hearing from IT staffers about computer science education. Are today’s college courses relevant to the technologies actually used in today’s data center, or did you feel like a deer in the headlights at your first data center job? If you didn’t go to school to learn your trade, how did you learn? What advice would you give a young person considering a career in IT? Leave a comment here, or send me an email.
Posted: October 18th, 2007 under Data center jobs, Data center management training and certifications, Data center job market and career advancement, Data center staffing considerations.
I have always viewed Certifications as a secondary revenue stream for vendors, rather than anything approaching qualification, education, or experience. Sure you have to process information in order to get them, but too often I’ve been disappointed in “certified” people. I think the certification process, since it is so vendor driven presents the world as the vendor perceives it, which in most cases is FAR from reality here on the ground where the rest of us actually work. As such when we recruit for IT staff, we advertise that Experience is more important than Certification.
We also recruit based on a generalist skill-set.
Ironically, the best technical people I know all have one thing in common: They never studied CS is school. They studied Physics, or Literature, or Languages, or Art. Go figure.
–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org
Comment by cgoolsbee — October 18, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
[…] Today I came across several articles asking that age old question: Should I get certified? Of interest was an article at SearchDataCenter.com that titled “IT Jobs: Certification Doesn’t Pay.” According to a study, non-certified IT professionals average more pay than their certified counterparts. The researchers stated that “The corner has officially been turned for IT professionals who choose to market the diversity of their talents, not just their technical skills.” So, is this the end of IT certification? Are we wasting our money going after MCSE, MCTS, MCITP, CCNA, CCDP, Network+ . . . ? […]
Pingback by Should I get Certified? : ITCertPro.com — October 27, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
Well if you don’t have the degree (which seems to have little ability to gage if a worker can do work that someone actualy wants to pay for) you need the certification just to get someone to talk to you. It’s a catch 22, ask your HR director! It all starts with the job posting within the company. If the mamager put degreee required in the minimum qualifications HR can’t consider the person without amending the posting and starting the process over. We all know what the manager and HR person are both thinking at that point…. Bottom line is that you have probably instantly cut out some good candidates!
Comment by Gene — January 11, 2008 @ 10:08 am