Certification Deflation

Published for the Week Of June 28, 2004

In a reversal from past surveys, vendor-specific certifications appear to be losing their earning power for technicians, according to data from the 2004 CRN Salary Survey.

Technicians holding multiple certifications received an average pay hike of 4.1 percent in 2003. But this was only slightly higher than the 3.9 percent increase for technicians with no certifications and less than the 4.6 percent increase received by those with a single certification.

Salary levels for technicians have also converged to the point where there was less than $1,000 difference in compensation levels among the three groups of technicians. Those with no certifications earned on average $60,700, while those with multiple certifications earned $60,150, the survey found.

Solution providers cited a number of reasons for these trends. Chief among them is the significant change that has taken place in the solution provider business model in the past couple of years.

“Vendor-specific certifications are becoming less important because of the shift to solution-based selling rather than product-based selling,” said Oli Thordarson, president of Alvaka Networks, Huntington Beach, Calif. “Vendors are now only a piece of the package. We are selling converged, integrated networking solutions, not just products.”

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With the shift to solution-based selling, the notion that there are too many vendor-specific certifications with too little focus is also becoming a key issue for solution providers. Many solution providers are asking themselves whether vendor-specific certifications are worth the time and money involved.

“It’s the old case of experience vs. certification, whether the piece of paper you hold implies you have the skills I need,” said Pete Busam, vice president and COO of Decisive Business Systems, Pennsauken, N.J. “In the past, certifications ensured that a technician had a certain level of competence, but that’s no longer the case. Is a newly certified individual an experienced technician who has added to his job skills or an out-of-work truck driver who managed to work his way through the course?”

Anthony Awtrey, vice president at I.D.E.A.L. Technology, Melbourne, Fla., echoes these feelings. “Vendors have a vested financial interest in turning out certified individuals, which is leading many of them—Cisco being an exception—to lower the bar when it comes to certification training,” Awtrey said. “This does not add the type of value that solution providers are looking for.”

The increasing importance of vendor-neutral certifications is playing a significant role in salary trends for technicians holding vendor-specific certifications.

With multivendor solutions the norm, solution providers are incurring increasing costs in terms of time and money in hiring certified individuals and providing certification training for existing staff. Under these circumstances, solution providers are seeing more and more value in a model where a single, vendor-neutral certification ensures a core level of competency in a specific technology and vendor-specific certifications are only added as needed.

The growing popularity of open-source technologies, such as those offered by JBoss and MySQL that can run on any platform, is also pushing the need for vendor-neutral certifications.

“These technologies don’t have vendors supporting them, so you need to custom-integrate in order to meet your customers’ needs,” Awtrey said. “This requires technicians that have a broad knowledge of the technology in question, not just a vendor’s specific part of it. Vendor-neutral certifications are an increasingly efficient way of meeting this need.”

In an environment where certified technicians are in plentiful supply, certifications appear to be losing value. And when it comes to solution-selling, generalists with strong communication skills and broad knowledge are rising in value.