Salary Survey Extra is a series of periodic dispatches that give added insight into the findings of our most recent Salary Survey. These posts contain previously unpublished Salary Survey data.‍

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‍Most career paths include some sort of mechanism for career growth and development. If you're a professional hit man, for example, then you might set out to kill someone, follow your target into an acting class, and make a sudden left turn into show business. (Tangent: Do all hit men go on to become actors, or is that just the plot of Barry on HBO?)

(Further tangent: Kermit the Frog once asked, "Why are there so many songs about rainbows?" What we'd really like to know, on the other hand, is "Why are there so many shows about hit men?" TV and movies both. It's like Moses told Pharaoh to free the Israelites or God would smite the land with a plague of filmed entertainment about killers.)

The point is that certification is a mechanism that IT professionals often use for career growth and development. Certification can help any IT professional add or refine critical skills and knowledge. And since most IT certifications require the credential holder to periodically recertify, the certification process challenges credential holders to keep their skills and knowledge current.

Along these lines, one of the questions we ask each year in our Salary Survey is for each survey respondent to identify their most recently earned certification. For some people, that may be the only certification they've ever gotten. Or it may be a credential that finished off a run of certifications several years ago.

In other words, that one question by itself is not necessarily indicative of which certifications have a lot of current and active interest. For many survey participants, on the other hand, certification is something that comes around every year, or couple of years.

That’s why we also ask survey respondents how many new certifications they've earned in the past year. And roughly 69 percent of certified IT professionals who responded to our 2023 Salary Survey earned one or more new certifications. About 35 percent earned two or more. So we can make at least a partial comparison that does give some indication of which IT certifications are attracting high levels of interest among certified professionals.

To start out with, here's the unfiltered list of most recently earned certifications. These are the Top 25 responses:

1) (ISC)² CISSP
2) (ISC)² CCSP
3) CompTIA Security+
4) ISACA CISM
5) EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
6) Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner
7) Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
8) Appian Certified Associate Developer
9) (ISC)² SSCP
10) (ISC)² CAP
11) HPE Master ASE - Hybrid IT Solutions Architect V1
12) CIW Advanced HTML5 and CSS3 Specialist
13) ISACA CISA
14) (ISC)² CSSLP
15) ISACA CDPSE
16) HPE ASE - Hybrid IT Solutions Architect V1
17) CCNA
18) AXELOS ITIL Foundation
19) Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
20) Adobe Certified Professional
21) HPE Master ASE - Edge-to-Cloud Architect V1
22) Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals
23) CIW E-Commerce Services Specialist
24) Xplor Master Electronic Document Professional
25) CIW Social Media Strategist

Now let's limit our search to only responses given by survey participants who actually earned a certification in the 12 months prior to the survey. Here's what that list looks like:

1) (ISC)² CISSP
2) (ISC)² CCSP
3) CompTIA Security+
4) ISACA CISM
5) Amazon Web Services Certified Cloud Practitioner
6) Appian Certified Associate Developer
7) Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
8) (ISC)² SSCP
9) EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
10) HPE Master ASE - Hybrid IT Solutions Architect V1
11) HPE ASE - Hybrid IT Solutions Architect V1
12) (ISC)² CAP
13) CIW Advanced HTML5 and CSS3 Specialist
14) Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
15) CIW E-Commerce Services Specialist
16) CIW Social Media Strategist
17) Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals
18) Adobe Certified Expert
19) AlienVault Certified Security Engineer (AVSE)
20) (ISC)² CSSLP
21) HPE Product Certified - AI and Machine Learning [2022]
22) Appian Certified Senior Developer
23) HPE Master ASE - Edge-to-Cloud Architect V1
24) Xplor Master Electronic Document Professional
25) CIW User Interface Designer

Some of the ordering of the list has changed a bit, but there's a lot of common ground between the two lists. So maybe it's fair to look at either list if you want to know which credentials are currently popular among the global community of certified IT professionals.

Perhaps there are a lot of IT folks out there who just missed the "past year" cutoff when they were taking the survey, but are still earning the same certs as most of the rest of our respondents. At any rate, if you're looking for a certification that's currently (or at least recently) of interest to a lot of certified IT professionals, then this is a reasonable place to start your search.

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