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Salary Survey Extra is a series of dispatches that give added insight into the findings of both our annual Salary Survey and our smaller Salary Survey PLUS polls. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.
Certification costs money. Generally speaking, that is. There are ways to save, of course, beginning with the abundance of free training and study materials that are available online, available in public libraries, and sometimes even available free from product vendors. Many people, particularly those who specialize in a product line like those of Cisco or Oracle, learn on the job by installing, configuring, using, replacing, or upgrading the products they're certified on.
Even if you never spend a nickel on study and training, however, there's generally a fee (sometimes a substantial fee) associated with taking the certification exam itself. And given that many people don't pass their test on the first attempt, the cost of retakes has to be factored in as well. Some certification exams can only be taken at a testing center, which occasionally involves travel costs. And even beta exams typically have a fee, albeit greatly discounted.
For most people, one way or another, there's going to be money involved at some point. It doesn't necessarily have to be your money that changes hands, however, even if you're the certification candidate. There's a proud tradition in our salary surveys of people passing the buck to someone or something else, and our recently concluded Networking Salary Survey showed once again that cost doesn't have to be an obstacle to certification.
We asked survey respondent how they handled the cost of their most recent certification, and here's what we found:
GO-ING, GO-ING ... Show of hands, who still has the Pokemon GO app installed on their phone? Surely you remember Pokemon GO. Just a few months ago, Pokemon GO was bigger than Wikileaks. One of two scenarios seems likely: Either Nintendo got in, got its billions, and got the (heck) out, and people have mostly gone back to plopping in the La-Z-Boy and being angry on Twitter. Or else the media couldn't be bothered to keep up its breathless Pokemon GO coverage, because β squirrel!
At any rate, since it seemed at the time as though we were quite possibly only days away from Pikachu mounting a credible third-party challenge and storming to electoral glory, well, we attempted to gauge the ubiquity of Pokemon GO among certified networking professionals. More specifically, we wanted to know just how far down the rabbit hole survey respondents had gone in pursuit of those adorable pocket monsters. Here's what we learned:
What? β 31.7 percent
Huh? β 28.9 percent
I downloaded the free app and played for a few days. β 17.7 percent
Yowza! I gotta catch 'em all! β 7.5 percent
Meh. I already caught 'em all. β 2.9 percent
I know a guy who got jumped trying to find a Pokestop. β 6.5 percent
That's not true. Nobody ever got jumped trying to find a Pokestop. β 4.0 percent
I downloaded the free app, played for a few days, then came to my senses after dropping $125 on in-app purchases. β 0.8 percent
Original Question: How deeply involved are you in Pokemon GO?
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