IT certifications have existed for about three decades now. Most people have an opinion of them too. You might feel quite strongly about IT certifications. People either tolerate them, love them, or scorn them.
- Misconception 1: If you earn a certification, that means you’ll earn more money.
- Reality: Very few organizations will compensate differently purely based on a newly earned certification. Instead, expect compensation to be evaluated in the normal schedule to be factored into a composite of your job performance, knowledge, and organizational impact. Certifications play a secondary role most of the time in a compensation discussion.
- Misconception 2: If you have a certification, you know the material aligned with the certification.
- Reality: Certification just can’t be a sufficiently accurate vehicle for assessing knowledge. And many certifications in IT have imperfect question pools, which don’t help their cause. If you are hiring purely based on certification you are opening yourself up to candidates that are good at testing and nothing more.
- Misconception 3: IT certifications don’t matter.
- Reality: Employers use IT certifications to quickly assess skillset of current and candidate employees. In most scenarios when comparing two individuals to qualify them for a position or role, a strong bias is given to the individual possessing the certifications.
- Misconception 4: Being Paper Certified Is Useless
- Reality: People must start somewhere. Any most start by getting a feel of a body of knowledge by studying for a certification. Sure, nothing makes up for industry and on-the-job experience. But most people start in a discipline with an appropriately-leveled certification, then that opens a door to more experience.
IT certifications are a huge asset to the IT community. They provide incentive, measurement and structure to progress and strive for improvement. But we should also be realistic and not put too much stake in them at the same time.
