Assessing a New List of "In-Demand" IT Certifications

"Best of" lists must be an evergreen topic for IT certification stories, because I’ve been watching them show up by the dozens and hundreds over the years since I started writing about IT certification back in the mid-1990s. I’m coming up on 30 years of such coverage next year, in fact.

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The Best/Highest-Paying/Most In-Demand certification salutations will probably never stop as long as IT certifications stay around. My reaction to such screeds varies by the focus, the selections included (and the method that drives inclusion), the information conveyed, and the perspicacity of the author(s) involved. In other words, YMMV.

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Today’s Victim: A list of "In-Demand" Professional Certs

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The story that's behind today's musings and analysis today comes from Entrepreneur magazine, in an unattributed June 19 story titled "The 9 Most In-Demand Professional Certifications You Can Get Right Now." And when I say it’s unattributed, it simply identifies the author(s) as "Entrepreneur Staff," and links to another page that shows other such stories and mentions seven writers under the heading "More Authors You Might Like." Hmmm.

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The story goes on to define "professional certifications" explicitly as follows:

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"Professional certifications are credentials you earn through short-term classes or programs, depending on the subject matter. Once you earn a certification, you can put it on your résumé, join certain organizations, and qualify for different positions."

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That story then goes on to use project management as a case-in-point example of such certification. It’s an excellent example. And, indeed, the Project Management Institute’s PMP and other related certs have remained high-demand, high-value certs for as long as they’ve been around (about 10 years longer than I’ve been covering IT and related credentials like these, in fact).

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The story’s overall discussion of what professional certification means, how long it takes, what it can do for you and your career, and so forth is actually spot on, and worth reading. It all sounds both familiar and reasonable to me (and at least harmonizes with my own opinions and writings on the topics involved).

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The descriptions of the picks in the list cover all the high points — prerequisites, cost, time commitment, and ideal outcomes — and will give you a pretty good idea of what’s what for each one.

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What’s missing from the story is any discussion of the methodology whereby the anonymous staff members selected the nine items they put on their list. Normally, when I put such lists together, I do so by scraping job postings from sites such as Indeed, SimplyHired, LinkedIn Jobs, and LinkUp, searching on specific cert names, then compiling statistics about which ones come up most frequently.

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A data-driven approach like that seems to be the most objective way to obtain such information, especially these days when few of the major cert providers regularly share information about their certification populations, growth trends, hottest items, and so forth. I don’t see anything like that in this story: The list just appears as if by magic.

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Stop Kvetching, and Share the List

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1) PMI Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)
2) PMI Project Management Professional (PMP)
3) IIBA Agile Analysis Certification (IIBA-AAC)
4) Certified Supply Chain Professional (CSCP)
5) CompTIA A+
6) SHRM-CP Certification
7) Google Digital Marketing and eCommerce Professional
8) Google Project Management Professional
9) IBM Data Science Professional

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Runner-up topic areas are also trotted out, and include: SEO certification, AWS fundamentals certification, social media marketing certification, and SFP (sustainability facility professional) certification.

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I’m delighted to report I’d never heard of items 3 and 4. I’m also bemused to see a lighter weight Google project management credential share equal billing with the PMI's CAPM and PMP. I’m mildly mind-boggled to see CompTA A+ in here, because even CompTIA positions it as an entry-level to early-mid-career kind of thing. But so it goes when ingesting and pondering other people’s picks for such lists.

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What I'm Thinking Is ...

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Professional certs in IT are those that get you into a community and put you on a well-defined career path. While there may not always be a cert ladder for such paths, there often will be one (or more, especially when big-gun professional societies like (ISC)² and ISACA compete for many of the same professional niches in security, governance, risk management, and so forth).

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You’re not just getting a certification when you get on such a pony: You’re buying into a vision of the niche you wish to inhabit and the training (and retraining, or continuing education) that goes with it. Program sponsors with large and carefully crafted sets of certifications — those ladders I was just talking about — want to bring you into their ecosystems and keep you busy learning and doing while you climb their various rungs, buy into their codes of conduct and ethics, and participate in their conferences, communities, ongoing training, and more.

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It's not just a certification, or collection of certs: It's really a lifestyle, worldview, and long-term relationship, all rolled into one thing. That what professional certification in today’s IT world is, at least as I understand it. Had they devoted more time and effort to putting their picks into context, I’m pretty sure that “Entrepreneur Staff” would agree with me on this. But alas, we’ll never know ...

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I included a photo of my 1973 college diploma as the lead-in graphic for this story. Why? Because it still represents the most valuable item in my portfolio of educational and training accomplishments. It’s an anthropology (“anthropologia” in the Latin) degree, and it has little or nothing to do with IT.

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But I believe it has been as or more instrumental in putting me to work than any other credential I have, and my work has involved full-time CS/IT employment since 1981 (42 years now, and counting). Though the battle of "degree vs. cert" continues, and cert often appears to outpunch diploma, I’m still of the opinion that both count though in different ways.

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But when it comes to professional credentials, a diploma still matters quite a lot, even in today’s wild west market where AI, cybersecurity, data analysis, and the many manifestations and applications of cloud computing truly rule the roost.