Networking certification: Are those initials worth it?

Computerworld - It's not hard to write the initials after your name: CCIE (Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert), CNE (Certified Novell Engineer) or dozens of others. They mean that you have a professional certification. The question is, for a networking professional, are those initials worth the effort necessary to acquire them?

"It's a tough question," said Robert Rosen, president of the Share IBM mainfrane user group and CIO of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases in Bethesda, Md. "But I know a lot of people who use them as a gating factor [when hiring], so if you want to maximize your opportunities, they're a good thing to have."

"It certainly is worthwhile," said Matthew Cody, now a convergence engineer at Verizon Business in Maplewood, N.J. Desiring to specialize, he began acquiring four different Cisco Systems Inc. certifications four years ago, and the effort eventually led to a new job with a 10% pay hike.

David Foote also tends to agree. As head of Foote Partners LLC in New Canaan, Conn., he tracks the career value of about 220 high-tech certifications, of which about a third involve networking.

His latest figures show that the possession of a networking certification results in an average pay premium of 9.2%. The average for all certifications is 8.2%. Noncertified networking skills result in a 7.1% premium, barely above the 7% average for all noncertified skills. (The best premium he found was 14%, for project management certification. The worst was 5% for a general certification, which was lower than the premium for any of the non-certified skills he tracks.)

But certifications offer benefits to organizations as well as to individuals, said Cushing Anderson, an analyst at IDC, a market research company in Framingham, Mass. As opposed to having a staff with no formal training, having a staff with certifications should increase the organization's ability to resolve networking failures by 20% to 40% and reduce the number of unexpected outages by 10%, he said.

Bosses who resist promoting certification among their staffers, fearing they will leave, are wrong, Anderson added, since training programs reduce turnover by 25%. "People who feel invested-in take that as a benefit and are more loyal, especially as the people around them also get trained," he noted.

As for the effort and money required to get certified, Anderson estimated that most people who follow the certification ladder spend three to six months every other year in some kind of training process. If taken in a classroom, the training might amount to 10 to 12 days at a cost of $500 to $1,000 per day, often funded by the esmployer. Online and self-directed study through books and videos are less expensive alternative. Anderson estimated that about a sixth of the students are "certification junkies" who collect certificates regardless of any financial rationale and may spend their own money.