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IT Salary Tracker: Certified IT Professionals

Certification has become a popular way for those who don’t yet have on-the-job experience in IT to get it. It’s also a favorite route for experienced IT pros desiring to stay relevant in their areas of expertise or to qualify for a higher level of responsibility. And with all the recent talk about certification–in discussion […]

Written By

Zachary Rodgers

Apr 17, 2000

3 minute read

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Certification has become a popular way for those who don’t yet have on-the-job experience in IT to get it. It’s also a favorite route for experienced IT pros desiring to stay relevant in their areas of expertise or to qualify for a higher level of responsibility. And with all the recent talk about certification–in discussion groups and on Web sites and college recruitment posters–we thought that readers might appreciate a statistical glimpse of the current job market’s demand for this particular resume item.

Our sister site, dice.com, an Internet-based job board for IT pros, contains a total of 636 jobs preferring some form of certification in their ideal candidate. Over a third of the openings are for business analyst / modeler positions. The largest concentration of these jobs is on the Western seaboard, with 80 in Silicon Valley and 76 in Los Angeles. There are an additional 191 jobs in locations not listed on the charts below, regions where dice.com lists fewer than ten openings.

One final note: Because open positions requiring certification cover a wide range of job types, from customer support specialists to project leaders, the salary and contract rate information below is most useful as a comparison tool for wage levels in different cities, not as an indicator of common pay rates for certified IT pros.

Data came from available jobs listed during Mar. 2000 at dice.com. Results are based on averages or totals from the following information on dice.com: salary, job type, job skills, and location.

Job title with the most demand:
Business analyst / modeler, 230 available jobs

City with the most demand:
Silicon Valley, 80 available jobs

Highest salary by city (average):
Silicon Valley, $80,000 yearly salary

Highest contract rate by city (average):
New York, $84 per hour