In a speech to the Republican National Convention in 1988, then presidential candidate George H.W. Bush likened America's volunteer organizations to a "thousand points of light." Twenty-eight years years later, we at Certification Magazine are grateful to the nearly 12,000 points of light in our own "broad and peaceful sky."

Dazzling us with their shimmering volunteer spirit, 11,753 certified IT professionals weighed in over the course of roughly seven weeks at the end of 2015, each contributing some 20 to 30 minutes of their time to help us create a picture of the IT salary landscape in the United States and elsewhere (115 other nations) around the globe.

Some of the flashier data points have already been reported in the Winter Edition of Certification Magazine. (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 in the weeks ahead: Articles with new survey data will be featured each week here at CertMag.com.

Our first disclosure, however, is the Big Cheese of the Salary Survey, a gimmick we hit on with last year's results and that has come back even bigger and better in 2016. Is there anybody who doesn't love a good old-fasioned power list? Everybody likes a good power list, right? We had a big response to our first Salary Survey 75 list a year ago, so here it is again.

The new-and-improved element comes out of a tweak that we applied to our number-crunching policies and procedures this year. In reporting our 2014 data a year ago, we lumped all the holders of a given certification together in a single body. We realized, however, that due to the vagaries of world currency, we were underrepresenting the actual salaries of a significant chunk of our survey population.

The overwhelmingly largest single body of respondents to all of our surveys is IT professionals who live and work in the United States. The United States accounted for 42 percent of all responses to the 2015 Salary Survey. (The next-largest group poured in from India.) So instead of calculating a single global average and leaving it at that, this year we kept that number, but added a U.S.-only average and an average that accounts for all countries outside the United States.

It's three times as much data as before. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. Stick with us, and you'll find out a whole lot more in the coming weeks and  months. For now, feast your eyes on this:

UPDATE: [Feb. 22, 5 p.m.]A previously posted version of this list contained text transfer and list ordering errors. This new version corrects the "U.S. Only" and  "U.S. and World" salary figures given for IBM Certified Solution Advisor, Cisco Certified Design Professional, and EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), the credentials numbered 36 through 38. The ordering of the credentials numbered 71 through 73 has also been corrected.