As written in a previous post, one of the possible criteria to value as good is a IT certification is correlate it to the real request on the IT world. Maybe is a material criteria, but it protect the investment and also make possible grow the skills of the certification (you must make practice or certifications just become useless).
The request and the offer could be loosely estimated by the salaries: usually where are high it mean that the request is high and of offer maybe is not enough (or simple that the skill is value high).
Recently Randy Muller, Global Knowledge Instructor, has written a survey (15 Top Paying IT Certifications for 2012) with a list of the top certifications (related to the salary):
- PMP® – Project Management Professional – ($111,209)
- CISSP® – Certified Information Systems Security Professional – $110,342
- CCDA® – Cisco Certified Design Associate – $101,915
- ITIL® v3 Foundation – ($97,691)
- MCSE – Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer – $91,650
- VCP – VMware Certified Professional – $91,648
- CCNP® – Cisco Certified Network Professional – $90,457
- CompTIA Server+ – $84,997
- MCITP – Microsoft Certified IT Professional – $84,330
- CCNA® – Cisco Certified Network Associate – $82,923
A you can notice none of the of “Top Certification” are in this list, for a simple reason: the rankings below are based on certifications that received the minimum 200 responses required to derive a salary figure that is statically accurate. There are certifications that pay more that are not represented due to their exclusive nature.