How to Pick the Right IT Certifications

Improve Team Effectiveness and Efficiency

Certifications can help IT managers and IT professionals to grow their teams and their skills, if chosen carefully. If you select the right bodies of knowledge, developed by the right people and which deliver the right skills for your work, then certification can lead to improvements in effectiveness, efficiency and communication within teams.

It's also essential that the certification body follow best practices in the creation and delivery of the exams. And, if you decide to use training to help achieve certification, you need to make sure to pick a program where the training supports the certification—not vice versa.

If you follow the basic concepts described here, you can obtain good value from IT certification programs, both as an IT professional and as a IT hiring manager.

Rex Black is President of RBCS. Rex is also the immediate past president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board and the American Software Testing Qualifications Board. Rex has published six books, which have sold over 50,000 copies, including Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Hebrew and Russian editions. Rex has written over thirty articles, presented hundreds of papers, workshops and seminars, and given over fifty speeches at conferences and events around the world. Rex may be reached at rex_black@rbcs-us.com.