Here we are again, stuck between Christmas and February. Just a few days ago, it was the most wonderful time of the year, and now the whole world is just sort of hanging out and wondering whether it's ever going to stop snowing. In February, you've got the Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, and the Oscars, which means that you practically can't swing your arms without smacking a party.

January is just kind of there, taking up space on the calendar. So that makes now an ideal time for a good pot-stirring conversation about money, right? Now that the Winter Edition of Certification Magazine is spread across the laps of faithful subscribers (or about to pop through on their personal media device of choice), it's time to start unpacking the results of our annual Salary Survey.

How about a round of applause for the 6,116 certified IT professionals who pitched in over the course of roughly seven weeks at the end of 2016 to get us here? Each of those hardy souls contributed some 20 or 30 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 (81 other nations) around the globe.

Some of the more notable data points have already been reported in the aforementioned 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 2017 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. 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 the numbers over, and we hope that you'll come back for more. This here 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: