No less a sayer of sooth than America's jolly old founding uncle, Benjamin Franklin, once said, "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest." There's no better bang for your buck, in other words, than to spend it on something that increases the sum total of your smarts and skills. Something like, for example, an IT certification.

You can't assign a dollar value to any IT certification that will be directly borne out in the experience of everyone who acquires that same credential. Different people earn different salaries based on several different variables. On the other hand, certification is absolutely a factor in many (if not most) IT hiring and compensation decisions.

Before we get to this year's Salary Survey hot ticket, however, how about a round of applause for the more than 4,700 certified IT professionals who pitched in over the course of roughly 12 weeks at the end of 2018 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 (95 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 2019 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 résumé 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: