It’s still an employee’s market for IT jobs. But as always, the right
skills are commanding the most pay. Over the 12-month period that ended
in July, premium pay for both certified and noncertified skills soared
by 9 percent, according to the latest survey of pay in the IT industry by Foote Partners.
Not surprisingly, hot sectors such as security, application development,
big data, and the cloud experienced the most gains. But the new report
contains a surprising bit of information: Noncertified job skills are
increasing most rapidly as some employers question the value of
certifications. “They [noncertified skills] are less immune to
manipulation,” says David Foote, the research firm’s chief analyst.
“The truth is that there are so many skills that employers find worthy
of extra pay, and for these skills either certifications don’t exist or
the ones that do are perceived as too easy to attain,” he says.
“Employers have always had their own ways to evaluate and accredit
skills expertise.”
What’s more, vendors have been flooding the market with new
certifications to support areas such as cloud, security, and
virtualization, an increase in supply that may ultimately affect
employers' perception of the value of certs going forward.
Nevertheless, IT certifications are still valuable tools, and despite
some doubts employers continue to pay solid premiums. Indeed, the
average market value for 378 IT certifications has increased for nine
straight quarters, the longest run in the 16 years Foote has traced the
industry.
(Foote’s numbers represent a premium paid over and above a base salary for specific skills or certifications.)
Who certifies the certifiers?
“In theory, anyone can set up a certification business: Create a few
online tests, charge X for taking a course online, pay for a little
marketing, and -- hey, presto -- you’re ready to issue certificates,”
David Bolton, a U.K.-based developer with more than a decade of
experience recently wrote in a blog post on Dice.com.
Foote doesn’t go nearly that far, but he says, “Certifications are
largely vendor-driven and managed to sell and resell products.” When a
product or service is new, vendors will push certifications as a way to
get their products into businesses. Eventually the supply of workers
with those skills increases, and the value of those certifications
declines -- but not of the underlying skills.
Cloud-related skills that don’t require a certification increased in
value by 5.4 percent in the six months ending in July. But cloud
certifications declined by 2 percent in the same period, Foote reports.
The disparity was even more noticeable in skills related to big data.
Noncertified skills increased in value by 8 percent over the past six
months, while certified skills declined by 1.2 percent.
The increasing value of big data-related skills followed a marked slowdown last year.
“The problem that developed in 2014 is too many employers have not been
satisfied with the return on their sizable investments in big data
initiatives," Foote said last year.
But that’s changed. “Many employers are taking a more measured,
longer-term perspective on their big-data investments,” he now says.
That likely means more spending and more hiring.
Spending on cloud-based big data will grow three times faster than
spending on traditional, on-premises solutions, and in the United States
alone there will be 181,000 deep-analytics roles in 2018 and five times
that many positions requiring related skills in data management and
interpretation, IDC predicted late last year.
Salaries still the bottom line
Employers are beginning to fold the value of skills in cloud and big
data into base salaries, say Foote. Those salaries remain mighty rich.
A survey by Dice.com,
a large tech-focused job board, found that the average base pay for
five big data-related skills is well over $110,000 a year. Knowledge of
Sqoop, a tool for transferring data between Hadoop and relational
databases, for example, is worth $114,000 a year. A “data scientist,”
what we used to call a data analyst, pays nearly $117,000, while a data
architect commands a salary of $118,000.
Those salaries do not include premium pay, a metric Foote tracks carefully, but Dice does not.
Looking out over the next six months, some of the noncertified,
cloud-related skills that are likely to increase in premium value
include Apache CloudStack, cloud security, Microsoft Azure, and
SolarWinds, while the only cloud-related certifications expected by
Foote to appreciate is Windows Certified Design Expert.
Noncertified big data skills likely to command larger premiums include
Apache Hive, Cassandra, CouchDB, MongoDB, and Hadoop, while four
Cloudera-related certifications will gain value.
Trends in premium pay are obviously related to overall market
conditions. Not too long ago, employers were actively outsourcing huge
chunks of their infrastructure operations, and the value of
certifications plummeted from 2006 to 2012. That reversed, and we’ve
seen growth in certification premiums for more than two years.
But then, the market appears to be changing again -- and that’s likely to change the market value of certified skills.
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