DEMAND AND SUPPLY, AND SUPPLY, AND SUPPLY…
According to a recent press release, more than 1 million Cisco certifications have been issued since the creation of the program.
Mind you, this isn’t the number of exams taken (many certifications require multiple exams), nor is it the number of attempts or anything else equally reasonable. Rather, this is the number of certifications actually issued — and it’s a number I find astounding.
Not only is 1 million greater than the population of many small countries, but out of that 1 million, “nearly 20,000″ are for CCIE — the Ph.D. of Cisco certifications. This means that 2 percent of all those holding Cisco certifications hold the highest certification from that vendor (it’s not clear how many of those certifications are current).
As large a number as 1 million is, it’s not the front runner. According to Microsoft, 2,254,381 certifications have been issued since the certification program began in 1992, which averages to over 140,000 a year. Of those, 185 are certified as Microsoft Certified Architects (MCAs), currently the highest level of Microsoft certification. Among those with the second-highest level of certification — the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) — 113,454 are certified in Windows Server 2003, and over 685,000 are certified in older technologies.
If you add together just those who’ve held either a Microsoft or Cisco certification, then factor it by the approximately 6 billion people in the world, that means that on average, one of out every 1,800 people has been certified. Add to that the “more than one million CompTIA certifications [that] have been earned worldwide”, the half-a-million certifications that have come from Novell, the 50,000 from LPI and so on. Before you know it, the supply of certifications issued is immeasurable.
Given this type of increase in supply, is it any wonder that when viewed in even the most simplistic, “Econ 101″ perspective, the value of certification has gone down?
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