IT certifications no longer sure path to premium pay

There’s been a raft of good news about the IT jobs market lately: Hiring is strong, and salaries climbed about 5 percent over the course of 2012. Now another, more complex piece of the jobs story is in, and it’s absolutely essential for IT pros to understand. Premium pay for certifications, which has been dropping for three years, is at an all-time low. This decline is offset by an increase in pay for a set of specific, noncertified IT skills.

In the last quarter of 2012, the average market value for 317 noncertified skills inched up about 0.5 percent, a tiny increase, but notable because it was the ninth gain in the past 11 quarters. At the same time, average premium pay for certifications declined for the 22nd time in 24 quarters, this time slipping by 1.57 percent, according to a survey by Foote Partners, which tracks the pay picture at more than 2,400 U.S. and Canadian employers.

Why are these key indicators moving in opposite directions? “If you look at what employers want, you’ll see that many of the skills and competencies that they need are not easily certified; or certifications for them simply don’t exist,” David Foote, CEO and chief research officer of Foote Partners, told me.

The erosion of premium pay for certifications may have bottomed out in a few areas, he says, but overall, the downward drift is likely to continue.

Big data, cloud, and business skills are hottest

If you’ve followed InfoWorld’s reporting on the IT jobs market over the last few years, a consistent theme has been the increasingly tight link between business and IT. More and more CIOs have MBAs and are judged by their success in finding ways to profit from the vast stores of data held by the enterprise. Given that reality, it’s no surprise that the successful IT professional now has a variety of complementary business and technical skills.

“Employers continue to aggressively pursue workers with multiple talents mixing technology, domain, business process and people skills,” says Foote. Unfortunately, IT pros that have been out of the workforce for some time aren’t likely to possess those skills, he adds, and certifications may not be the way to obtain them.

“Traditionally the certification industry was narrowly focused,” says Foote. “It grew years ago when IT work was systems, security, networks, and server configurations. That world was blown up when the Internet came in.” The certification industry, of course, moved to catch up, but now big data and cloud computing are making traditional certifications less relevant.

That’s not to say that people with the right mix of pure technical skills aren’t in demand. They are. For example, as Foote writes in his firm’s latest report: “Cloud administrators who are adept at automating the configuration and operations in a cloud environment by combining a variety of different skill sets around systems administration, virtualization, storage, and network administration. It’s not about just configuring and running a server.”

Similarly, “data architects who may have traditional programming background but are also well versed in statistics and data management” and “find new ways to harness data to meet business needs” are in high demand.

There are now 30 or 40 cloud certifications in place or on the horizon, and it will take some time to know if they are rewarded with significant premium pay, says Foote. Although there’s not a lot of data yet, cloud-related skills that are gaining value and earning well above-average premiums include Java SE/Java EE programming, and experience with VMware vCloud, EMC Cloud, or HP Cloud.

In big data, pay and demand for noncertified database skills performed the strongest in 2012, gaining 14.8 percent in value overall. Big gains were also seen by those with big data analytics, Hadoop, and Cassandra experience.

Where the jobs are
The IT job market was quite volatile in the last half of 2012, but overall the picture was very good. For the full year, there was a net gain of 113,300 IT jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Foote and other analysts are often critical of how the BLS tracks IT jobs, and some of the categories are not well-defined.

That said, the hottest segment was the one called Management and Technical Consulting Services, which gained 5,800 jobs in December, for a yearly total of 56,700 new jobs in 2012. Computer systems design/related services added 5,600 jobs in December and 74,900 for the year.

Those gains were partially offset by losses in several other BLS-defined segments, which showed a job loss of 18,300 jobs, nearly all coming from telecommunications employers. Even that bad news had a bit of a silver lining; most of the losses came in the first half of the year, leading Foote to think the telecommunications segment may have reached a bottom.

“For IT professionals 2012 certainly ended on a good note, with December exceeding the monthly average for the entire year,” says Foote. “In fact, average job growth in the last three months of 2012 by nearly 350 jobs per month. That may seem like a small margin, but there is momentum attached to it, and that’s a really good sign of things to come in the next few months.”

This article, “IT certifications no longer sure path to premium pay,” was originally published by InfoWorld.com.