Tech Certifications No Longer Get Biggest Pay Premiums, Says ReportTech Certifications No Longer Get Biggest Pay Premiums, Says Report

Over the last couple of years, employers increasingly have been saying they're seeking workers who have a mix of tech skills, business acumen, and an understanding of customers.

Now, a new report shows for the first time that pay premiums for non-certified skills sets exceeds that of certified tech skills.

Non-certified skills on average received an 8.08% premium as a percentage of base pay, according to research firm Foote Partners' analysis of pay trends for 156 non-certified skills in the third quarter of 2007.

Meanwhile, for the first time in the eight years Foote Partners has been conducting its quarterly pay analysis, certified skills on average received an average premium of only 7.97% of base pay, based on the analysis of 159 certified skills.

So, for the first time, the average pay premium paid for certified tech skills is less than the premium paid for non-certified skills. While the pay gap is only about 0.1%, "that's a huge difference in the world of pay stats," said David Foote, CEO and chief research officer and co-founder of Foote Partners.

This doesn't mean that employers aren't seeking people with hard-core tech skills, but it does show that employers are less willing to pay a premium for certified skills, said Foote, in an interview. Foote Partners monitors pay trends of 74,000 IT professionals in the U.S. and Canada.

In general, certifications have been oriented towards vendors' particular products, platforms, and technologies. And employers had been willing to pay a premium for those certified skills, especially in the recession years following the dot-com bust, when employers were seeking ways to justify pay for key skills of technology professionals and in meeting infrastructure demands related to Sarbanes Oxley, Foote said.

But over the last two years or so, the emphasis at many companies is swinging towards using IT for helping to create new products, generating more profit and sales, improving customer service and relationships, Foote said. And this has translated into IT professional jobs requiring a more hybrid mix of technology skills, along with understanding the business and its customers, he said.

"These convergence trends are growing. IT people are members of the business team," he said. "IT organizations aren't buried in the data center, but are parts of the lines of business, business units, entrenched with users." And so, while companies are still looking for IT professionals to have solid technical skills, they're also expecting them to have an understanding of the business and customers, and are less willing to pay a higher premium for tech certifications, with the exception of some, such as security, he said.

Among the hottest non-certified skills seeing a pay premium are those related to enterprise business applications, application development, Web and e-commerce, databases, and management, process, and methodology.

The Foote Research pay finding comes on the heels of an annual study by the Society for Information Management, which found that CIOs for the first time named talent-related worries as their top management concern.

Editor's Note: This story was changed on Oct. 17 to correct the different in pay premiums for certified and non-certified skills.