Evergreen IT Certifications Part I

Ed Tittel

Ed Tittel is a 30-year-plus veteran of the computing industry, who’s worked as a programmer, a technical manager, a classroom instructor, a network consultant and a technical evangelist for companies that include Burroughs, Schlumberger, Novell, IBM/Tivoli and NetQoS. He has written and blogged for numerous publications, including Tom's Hardware, and is the author of over 140 computing books with a special emphasis on information security, Web markup languages and development tools, and Windows operating systems.

Mary Kyle

Mary Kyle is a full-time freelance writer, editor, and project manager based in Austin, TX. A former IBMer, Mary has over 10 years of project management experience in IT, software development and IT-related legal issues.

The first in a three part sub-series presenting the Top 10 most sought-after certifications for IT pros.

When it comes to pondering IT certification choices, a certain group of credentials keeps coming to the fore. If you look at various IT certification salary surveys, or reports on the most sought-after (or earned) IT certification credentials, you’ll see certain names or acronyms popping up again and again. This article presents the Top 10 as we see them—based on recent pay surveys in IT, reports from users about certifications they want or pursue the most, and those that pop up most frequently in job postings online.

To forestall comparing apples to kumquats (all these certs are quite different, and range from entry- to senior-level in terms of knowledge, skills and experience required to earn them), we present them in three parts in alphabetical order, with no intention of ranking them against one another.

Certs are arranged in alphabetical order.

In this article, we start with a pair of Cisco certifications and another developed by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium. Part II examines Microsoft IT Professional and Technology Specialist certifications. The third and last article details CompTIA's Network+ and Security+ certifications, in addition to the  Password Management Professional and VMware Certified Professional accreditations.

We launched our extensive IT training, education  and certification series with a comprehensive overview of Training Options for IT Pros.