In Shakespeare's comedic romp The Merry Wives of Windsor, jealous husband Ford seeks to trip up boisterous schemer Falstaff by appealing to the old knight's greed, fortifying his pitch with the aphoristic observation that, "If money go before, all ways do lie open." Maybe that's true and maybe it isn't, but most people would probably agree that it at least sounds true.

And it probably at least somewhat explains why so much of life seems to revolve around the getting, saving, and spending of money. There are many different ways of getting money, of course, but most people focus on the time-honored route of acquiring skills and expertise, and then selling whatever it is they can do to somebody who needs that thing done.

That's usually how we end up talking about money around here, since certification is one of the leading methods of gaining skills and expertise in the realm of computers and information technology (IT). How much you can charge for your skills and expertise depends on a number of different factors, but certification can certainly play a role in determining salary.

Before we get to this year's Salary Survey hot ticket, however, how about a round of applause for the more than 5,000 certified IT professionals who pitched in over the course of roughly 12 weeks at the end of 2019 to get us here? Each of those hardy souls contributed some 15 or 20 minutes of their time and 70-ish questions' worth of their personal data to help us create a picture of the IT salary landscape in the United States and elsewhere (98 other nations) around the globe.

Some of the more notable data points have already been reported in our Winter Edition. (If you aren't already a print or digital subscriber, then you can go here to subscribe, or just grab a digital copy, or an ink-and-paper single.) We'll be bringing you all of that and more as 2020 marches forward: Over the next few months, articles with new survey data will be featured each week here at CertMag.com.

Our first dramatic reveal, however, is the Big Cheese of the Salary Survey, a survey output that first appeared in 2015 and has quickly become one of our most popular annual disclosures: the Salary Survey 75. People are competitive by nature, and this is a relatively harmless way to compare yourself to the Other Guy and see whose certification is at least potentially more valuable.

(No, we aren't implying that everyone who has Certification A can expect to make Salary B from Employer C straight out of the testing center. As touched on above, there are many factors that determine salary, and the presence or absence of a particular credential on your resume is only one of them. It sure is a fun one to talk about, though, right?)

We hope you enjoy looking over the numbers, and we hope that you'll come back for more. Making a list of 75 certs is merely the tip of the iceberg. Stick around and you'll find out a whole lot more in the coming weeks and months. For now, feast your eyes on this: