Part 1: One Method for Rating Certifications

Many prospective IT employers actively seek out job candidates who possess college degrees and various specific certifications. Perhaps even your current employer looks at IT certification as an important or deciding factor when it comes to promotions, bonuses, or raises. With so much attention focused on certification, many IT professionals enter the certification maze trying to determine which one is the “best” or “right” for them. Deciding which certification to pursue is no easy task. Not only are there hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of certifications from which to choose, they come in varying shapes and sizes in terms of price (some can be costly), time to complete, ongoing continuing education requirements, and membership or renewal fees. Let’s face it: although IT certifications provide IT professionals with specialized information and improved skills and knowledge, certifications must also be worth the investment. At a minimum, they should give you an edge on the competition in a job search, or help you move up within the ranks in your current organization.

It can be daunting to sort through the many and various IT certifications to strike the right balance between time and money spent, then assessing their actual financial and career benefits. To help in this selection- and decision-making process, many experts and IT professionals rate IT certifications according to specific, well-defined criteria. While everyone may use different criteria, here we introduce and explain those we consider to be most important; namely career level, time commitment for completion, number of exams and costs, along with prior experience required, and (of course) the potential for future income such credentials can confer.

As each criterion is introduced, it’s also defined and explained. Each criterion is assigned a range of values, which we then put together and map into an overall ranking value. For example, given that certifications can take from one month to two years to complete, we could use the number of months as a ranking value, or we could divide the number of months by 2.4 (to map 24 months into a 10-point scale).

At the end of our ranking exercise, we simply add ranking values for all criteria to calculate a total score for each certification as a whole. This lets you compare these scores to decide how certifications compare to one another and which ones might be right for you. In Ranking Certifications, Part 2: The Ratings, we provide a table that provides rankings for 113 popular IT certifications. Though it’s not an exhaustive survey, this article is intended to provide sufficient information to help you apply this approach to other certifications not included in the survey.

There is room for adjustment or interpretation here, however. Mapping all ranges into the same scale for each criterion weights all criteria equally. Mapping some ranges into bigger scales gives them greater weight because we add values to calculate a certification’s overall ranking. That’s why we explain the weighting that our formula gives to various criteria so that you’ll understand how to change the ranking characteristics if you like. And if you decide you don’t like our approach, you can customize your own!

Choosing Certification Ranking Criteria

For this ranking exercise, we chose criteria that, in our opinions, are important when evaluating IT certifications and their benefits. If you wish to consider other factors you consider important, you can easily add them to create your own ranking system. We use these criteria to rank numerous certifications in our companion article Ranking Certifications, Part 2: The Ratings. Here are those criteria with their respective values and weights:

• Career Level: Assigns one of four values to a certification, based on how it’s positioned for candidates:
  • Entry-level, basic, or beginner: value of 2
  • Intermediate or novice: value of 4
  • Advanced or senior-level: value of 6
  • Expert, instructor, or specialist-level: value of 8.

Thus, A+ certification would be worth 2 on this scale, and the various Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certifications would be worth a minimum of 8. This approach increases the scores for more senior certifications, which is as we think it should be.

• Average Time to Completion: Lists the average of the fastest known time to completion and the longest reasonable time to completion for a certification, unless the certification itself includes a time requirement. For example, the fastest Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) completion that I’ve come across was one month; a long but not unreasonable completion time is 18 months. Thus, I set the average at 9 months. This squares up nicely against an analysis of average completion times in the “real world.”
• Number of Exams: Number of exams candidates must pass to obtain certification. (It does not take into account the average number of tries to pass an exam.)
• Cost of Exams: Cost for all exams that candidates must pass to obtain certification. As with the preceding criterion, it does not take into account the average number of tries to pass any exam.
• Experience Requirement: Some certifications are entirely amenable to book or classroom learning, whereas others are unapproachable without real-world, hands-on experience with the tools and technologies that such certifications cover. Here, we rank such requirements as low (2 points), medium (4 points), high (6 points) or extremely high (8 points). For example, we rate the Certified Wireless Networking Expert (CWNE) as high and the CCIE as extremely high.
• Income Potential: Some certifications are pretty common or don’t add much additional income potential to their holders. We rank a certification’s income potential as low (2 points), medium (4 points), high (6 points) or extremely high (8 points). For this criterion, for example, I rate the VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP) as medium and the Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) as extremely high. Some values are higher than 8 for “special cases,” such as the CCIE (14 points).

Although there are undoubtedly more criteria that we could use to rank certifications, these six criteria produce values that are useful enough to make our comparisons interesting and informative. For example, we could easily define another cost metric that uses the average cost for web-based training because many certification programs offer such education today. As it turns out, though, that particular ranking adds little value to the existing data because it stays in line with the values for self-study and classroom costs.

In Ranking Certifications, Part 2: The Ratings, Table 1 ranks 113 IT certifications according to the six criteria discussed above. To save space, we’ve shortened longer certification monikers (hopefully, they should still be pretty clear).

Summary

Hopefully, you’ll find this approach useful as you compare and contrast the certifications specifically mentioned in Table 1 of Ranking Certifications, Part 2: The Ratings. Even better, we hope it gives you some insight into how to weigh and rank other certifications not mentioned there. By providing a collection of criteria and documenting our value assignments and weighting mechanisms, we hope you not only find some value in the rankings that do appear, but also that you use similar evaluations and ratings to rank other certifications that may interest you, but that don’t appear in that table.

Part 2: The Ratings

Aspiring or active IT professionals can benefit from an improved understanding of how top IT certifications are ranked in terms of time commitment, cost, and other factors to obtain the certification against the ultimate financial or career advancement return on investment. Here, you’ll find a table with rankings for 85 different leading IT certifications.

Certifications Mentioned

There are 113 certifications from 26 vendors listed in our rankings. To see the list in alphabetical order by vendor/sponsor name, click here to open a PDF.

To see the certifications in order by ranking, click here to open a PDF.

The Rankings

In Ranking Certifications, Part 1: One Method for Rating Certifications (2013 Edition), we examine one way to take an objective look at how the time commitment for completion, cost, and other factors stack up when compared to the financial benefit that one might hope to reap by obtaining such certifications. These criteria included career level, completion time, number of exams required, exam cost, prior experience or skill required, and perhaps most importantly, the income/earnings potential associated with such certification.

We used the ranking system described in Ranking Certifications, Part 1 and applied it to 113 leading IT credentials. Because of the high value of experience and pay related to the credential, we double those values and add them to the rest of the ranking values unchanged (and thus also unweighted). We also used an out-of-range value for experience in the CCIE and a few other select rankings because of their extremely demanding curricula and numerous observations that such credentials demand an unusually high level of technical acumen and experience.

You can add other criteria to create your own chart, with your own values and ranking approach, but our rankings should give you enough information to assist in your decision making when selecting the right IT certification in which to invest your time and money.

The ranking is organized as follows:

• Name: Provides a moniker for each certification.
•       Level: Defines a job ranking as entry-level (2), intermediate (4), advanced (6) or expert (8).
•       Time: Defines the average time to completion in months.
•       # Exams: The total number of exams required.
•       Cost: Totals the cost for the exams that must be taken. We divide this number by 100 to scale it to match other ranking values, so the value represents thousands of dollars.
•       Experience: Defines how much hands-on experience is required to attain this cert. Valid values are low (2), medium (4), high (6) and extremely high (8). Some values go even higher than this, as you will see for the CCIE. We double this value when calculating the rank metric to make sure it receives proper emphasis.
•       $$$: Defines the income potential for cert holders. Values come from averaging reported pay at Indeed.com for job postings that mention the certification by name. All $$$ values are divided by 10,000 to adjust pay into a range between 3 and 16, but the weighting algorithm doubles this value to make sure it assumes its proper significance.
•       Rank: Sums the total of all ranking values for the certification.

For more information on the criteria definitions and ranking weights for this table, please seeRanking Certifications, Part 1: One Method for Rating Certifications.

By Ed Tittel

Source:

Part 1: http://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1832676

Part 2: http://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1832677

“They don’t like me,” says Nir Zuk of his old bosses. As one of the earliest employees at Check Point Software Technologies in the 1990s he wrote parts of the world’s first commercial firewall. He later built essential chunks of the firewall sold by Juniper Networks. But at both companies, Zuk (pronounced “zook”) ended up quitting in a huff–and, in one case, walking away from millions of dollars in unvested stock options. Why? The Israeli engineer felt his best ideas were being blocked by incompetence and office politics. All he ever wanted, he insists, was to build new things.

Zuk’s revenge is Palo Alto Networks, which sells the first new class of firewall in 11 years. The company successfully IPOed in July 2012, bringing in $260 million. Its products are crushing the competition. Palo Alto has only 4% of the $10 billion network security market, but it’s rapidly gaining share. In the most recent quarter its revenue was up 70% to $96 million, an increase of $40 million, equal to the entire revenue gain for all other firewall companies. Check Point, which has 15% of the market, grew by $12 million, up only 3%.

With a chip on his shoulder the size of Mount Sinai, Zuk never misses an opportunity to poke fun. He pulls out his iPhone and shows me a photo of a Palo Alto billboard just outside of Check Point’s offices in Tel Aviv. In Hebrew, it reads: “You just passed Check Point. So have we. Palo Alto Networks.” At a March investor conference in New York, Zuk led a live demonstration to prove the speed and ease of updating his firewall. While Palo Alto’s product took five seconds to update, Zuk was able to brew and drink a double espresso in the time it took to update Check Point’s. The rivalry goes deeper than stunts. Palo Alto’s board has two major defectors: Shlomo Kramer, a Check Point cofounder, and Asheem Chandna, a former Check Point vice president who bankrolled Palo Alto as a partner at venture capital firm Greylock.

The firewall battle has never been more relevant. The past few years have brought an acceleration in the number and sophistication of cyberattacks. In 2011 a U.S. government report accused China and Russia of trying to build their economies on stolen intellectual property. The job of protecting a network has grown more complicated as employees increasingly demand to use their iPads and smartphones at work, and clamor for external Web applications like Dropbox, Skype, Google Docs and Salesforce. These devices and apps are common entry points for hackers and thieves. Quantifying the IP and research losses from cyber-raids is difficult, but the damage could be as high as $400 billion annually. Attacks come from the inside, too. At Valspar an employee downloaded paint formulas that he planned to take to China. That theft was valued at $20 million, one-eighth of Valspar’s annual profit.

Firewalls are designed to keep this sort of thing from happening. They prevent malware from getting into a network, and they prevent sensitive data from getting out. The problem is that traditional firewall software, like the kind sold by Check Point, Juniper and Cisco, relies on something called stateful inspection. Stateful inspection specifies the kinds of data packets it will accept or drop. Everything is either “good” or “bad.”

This presents a tough choice to the many firms that have become dependent on Web apps. Stateful inspection offers only two options: Block the apps to mitigate risk exposure, or let them in and hope for the best.

Palo Alto’s next-generation firewall cuts through the impasse. It can parse all the components of a Web application like Facebook to selectively allow, for instance, the reading of News Feeds while blocking Chat and Games features . Employees can read Twitter feeds but not tweet; they can share Dropbox documents without worrying about attached malware. Conversations between IT security and other departments no longer have to begin and end with “No.” “Our competitors agree on the problem,” Zuk says. “They agree that Dropbox is dangerous. Their solution to Dropbox being dangerous is to block Dropbox. Our solution is to make Dropbox safe.”

Palo Alto, founded in 2005, now has 11,000 customers, including 500 among the Global 2000. More than 60% of its customers use Palo Alto as its primary firewall, a portion that climbs to 75% if you count only customers signed up since August. Independent analysts confirm Zuk’s claim of being out in front. “All their competitors are stuck in a rut, and they tend to drop their pants,” Forrester Research analyst John Kindervag says. “They are several years away from catching up. Some are bringing next-generation firewalls to market. Some are good. Some are more marketing than reality. They discount significantly.”

How’s all this sitting with Check Point, the Israeli firm whose billionaire cofounders, Gil Shwed and Marius Nacht, invented the original commercial firewall? Check Point declined to comment for this story, but when FORBES talked with Shwed in November, he avoided mentioning both Zuk and Palo Alto by name: “I think it’s sad that good people try and do things like that. This person was a disgruntled employee from Check Point–a very smart guy, I’m not trying to take that away,” he continued. “They’ve got good things, too. I like to think that we have much, much better things, much better technology.”

There was a time when Zuk and Shwed were brothers-in-arms. Three years Zuk’s elder, Shwed began his required service in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1986. He entered into Unit 8200, an elite electronic intelligence arm, at age 18. It was there that he built the world’s first packet-filtering device that screened traffic based on Internet Protocol address.

Zuk was a natural for Unit 8200. He learned to read and write before entering school. He got his first pair of glasses in the third grade after years of fooling school nurses by memorizing the vision chart. In the sixth grade he became chess champion of Israel’s eighth-grade-and-under division. Zuk begged his parents to get him a Dragon 64 computer for his bar mitzvah. He went on to create some of the world’s first computer viruses. “Just for fun,” he insists.

He joined Shwed’s unit in 1990. They worked together closely for a year, until Shwed’s time was up. Shwed went off and founded Check Point in 1993 with fellow military men Shlomo Kramer and Marius Nacht. Zuk served in the IDF through 1994, spending an extra year in officer training, and started overseeing a small group of engineers. He realized he didn’t like managing people. He was recruited by Check Point and helped build its flagship product, Firewall-1.

Possessing the best English skills on the engineering team, Zuk moved to California in 1997 to run Check Point’s new-product staff. He bought a house with his wife in Redwood City and enjoyed the autonomy of his new role. He was especially excited about new software his team created that would eliminate network congestion. But when the project was done he learned that the Israeli engineers were disgruntled because the American team was producing new products while they maintained old ones. His new product was killed off. Nacht told Zuk to return to Israel. “I had just bought a house,” he says. ” ‘Are you crazy?’ I was like, ‘I get it. Adios.’ ” He left Check Point in March 1999.

Zuk went on to start OneSecure, the first intrusion-detection and prevention outfit. After two quarters’ sales the tech bubble burst, and the company was sold over Zuk’s objections to Netscreen for $40 million in 2002. “ They didn’t have the stones to keep supporting the company,” he says.

When Juniper Networks bought Netscreen in 2004 for $4 billion, Zuk was eager to lead the effort to completely revise its firewall . But he says his requests were ignored. “They were focused on cutting costs and moving engineering to China and India,” he says. He left the company and gave up 300,000 unvested shares worth about $6 million, in early 2005.

Zuk’s life took a turn south after Juniper. His ten-year marriage dissolved along with the small fortune he had cobbled together from stints at four different companies. He moved into a small apartment in Mountain View, on the periphery of Palo Alto. He faced the unenviable task of starting his life over at the age of 35.

Rescue came in the form of a phone call from Chandna, who had left Check Point two years earlier to become a partner at Greylock. Chandna had been following Zuk’s career all the way to its sad slump. “Check Point had an exceptional engineering team,” Chandna says. “But Nir was by far the brightest. He’s arguably the most accomplished individual in network security on the planet.”

Chandna and Zuk started hashing out a security idea that would be “dominant, lasting, with multibillion-dollar revenues,” Chandna says. Greylock and Sequoia Capital gave Zuk $250,000 to come up with the product. Working out of offices at Greylock and Sequoia, he came back with the next-generation firewall.

The next year the two VC firms put up $9 million more. Another $400,000 came from Zuk, Check Point cofounder Kramer and others. “If I screw up on Palo Alto there is no family, no money, no nothing,” he remembers. “I will stay in that crappy apartment in Mountain View for the rest of my life.”

Palo Alto got its firewall to market quickly by drawing on kibbutz-style redistributionism. Zuk significantly diluted his equity to 5% so early hires could have a healthy stake in the company. “There’s no justification for a founder getting to an IPO with 25% of the company,” Zuk says. “The Greylock and Sequoia partners said it would come out of my share. I said that is fine.” That decision cost him. His 4.7% ownership is worth roughly $180 million today. He’d be a billionaire if he had kept a more standard 25%.

In August 2011 the board brought in Mark McLaughlin, an executive at security firm Verisign, to be its Wall Street-friendly CEO. Zuk, now chief technology officer, doesn’t manage anyone and acts as the firewall against bureaucracy. Even though the firm is adding 100 employees per quarter, Zuk refuses to hire project managers. “They don’t produce anything,” he says. “All they do is coordinate. The people who do the work should coordinate.” It’s nice to know that success hasn’t changed Zuk one bit.

[This story appears in the April 15, 2013 issue of Forbes]