Are IT Certifications a Waste of Your Time and Money?

My favorite Information Week author Marianne Kolbasuk McGee release a new article last week titled, "In Growing Job Market, IT Pros Get More for the Soft Skills"  Here's an excerpt.

"One report concludes that employers are now paying higher premiums for non certified tech skills--areas like enterprise applications, e-commerce, and process management--than those paid for certified skills. That research comes from Foote Partners, which has done in-depth quarterly employer surveys of employers for eight years".

Isn't that interesting, the report indicates that tech skills areas that don't have certification programs are higher paying than positions that do have certifications available. It's been my experience that most certified professionals acquire their certification using their own time and their own money. It looks like the investment is not paying off the way it was anticipated. So many people have acquired certifications (especially Microsoft Certifications) that the value of the certification has been diminished. I know for a fact that my clients are not impressed by certifications. But they are impressed by Personal Leadership, Solution Oriented Mindsets, Excellent Communication Skills, Aptitude and Passion. There's more to the article including some statistics on job growth in specific IT categories. Read More.

The only exception to certification seems to be PMP. While I have not seen this here locally, but PMP certifications can gain a Project Manager about 10% more salary than non certified Project Manager.

Let's move on to the Job Growth Categories. Here's another excerpt from the article

"The biggest job growth categories continue to be software engineers, computer scientists and systems analysts, and IS managers. Two categories shrank: programmers declined 5%, while support specialists fell 4%. The jobs statistics continue trends that have marked IT employment's slow recovery from a fierce downturn between 2002 and 2004, when the number of jobs fell below 3.3 million".

I wonder about the growth category titles. Information Technology Departments have been moving away from the title of Programmer for over ten years, favoring the title Developer and most recently moving more towards the title of Software Engineer. While I'm sure that we could argue the semantics of the roles, at a core root level these positions are essentially the same.

Next the support specialist category dropped by 4%, I seen this as a growing trend as more offshore outsourincg contracts are executed for support services. It also may be related to the strides commercial companies are making in their efforts to automate more of their computer operations processes, which theoretically reduces support labor requirements and improves service levels. More research would be required to find out the details of this trend, but I expect it to continue.