According to CIO.com, the right certifications could mean up to 16 percent increase in your base pay, but why? Certifications are milestones that validate your skills and experience, but they also say a lot about you as a professional.
Here are 3 ways getting certified increases your market value.
Consider hiring an individual that studied a Bachelors for four years, then dropped out just before their final exams and didn’t get their degree. Would they be trusted with a project? As you learn throughout your professional career, it’s important to ‘bank’ your acquired skills and experience. Here’s why:
1. A Certification Sells You Better Than You Can
Everyone at some point in their career has usually encountered someone poorly competent yet highly qualified -on paper. The lesson is that in management, one of the most difficult skills is correctly evaluating people, especially when hiring or considering someone for pay raise or promotion. Managers thus usually default to a mix of qualitative judgement (e.g. a person’s confidence and likeability) and what they can quantify: projects completed, awards and certifications acquired.
If you would rather not bet the future of your career on how personally charming your boss thinks you are, getting certified is an excellent way to increase your market value.
2. ‘Banking’ Your Experience
One of the most important aspects of any job is the skills and knowledge you pick up in practicing it. In all sciences but tech in particular; a professional’s craft improves continuously through practice, incremental innovations, peer-to-peer sharing, and the general ‘pull’ of the industry as technology evolves and companies transform.
Leaving this skill and experience in a cloudy, unstructured mess at the back of your mind, only called forward when needed, is a lost opportunity. A short course to help complete and organise your knowledge in a recognised framework, a two-hour certification exam, and this knowledge is now industry-recognised.
3. Developing Yourself
Not all professionals are so lucky to see the boundaries of their skills and knowledge continuously challenged with new and interesting projects. When work becomes repetitive and learning plateaus for significant periods of time; it can lead to boredom, decreased job satisfaction, and a dearth of career opportunity.
During these times is when it’s most important to pursue alternative paths in growing yourself, or risk falling into a rut and losing all motivation. Outside learning through professional certification bodies can fill this gap. Research those courses, techs, and skills on the cutting edge of your field, and reach out to your HR team to get funding. Bringing new ideas and capabilities back to your department will see your market value increase, to your company and others.
Upcoming Courses:
- Microsoft Word (4th – 6th September)
- R for Data Science (10th – 13th September)
- Certified Digital Marketing Specialist (23rd – 27th September)
- Certified IoT Specialist (24th – 26th September)
- iOS Certified Associate Developer (30th September – 4th October)
- R for Data Science (10th September – 2nd October)
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