Every year our friends at Certification Magazine throw open their digital door, so to speak, and invite everyone inside for hot apple cider and donuts. OK, not really. It usually happens around the time of year when hot cider and donuts sounds like a fine idea, but what they really do is fire up the Salary Survey apparatus and start collecting data from everyone who's willing to contribute — everyone, that is, who is willing to contribute and has at least one current IT certification. There is a degree of remuneration involved: If you take and complete the survey, then you'll be eligible to get the digital edition of Certification Magazine free for an entire year. Or you can get the print version for a year at 40 percent off the normal price. Or you can do both. Pretty cool, right?
What's really cool is all of the data that gets pumped out, both in the Salary Survey edition of the magazine itself (in January) and online at CertMag.com. The best-known output is the Salary Survey 75 list of top-salaried certifications, but that's just the tip of a very large iceberg. There are new online articles every week, from January through December. None of it can happen, however, without the participation of a pretty impressively large number of certified IT professionals. There are plenty of such folks out there, but it's one thing to know (in the broadest sense) who they are, and something else altogether to get them to take a 15-minute survey. So if you're reading this, please take the survey, and then suggest it to a friend. The more people who participate, the better the outcome for all of us.
They say it takes all kinds. Who says that? Well, tech industry association CompTIA, to cite one example, says that. At the end of last week, CompTIA released a report, drawn from a recent survey of 1,000 individuals, that assesses the generational makeup of the current U.S. workforce. In other words, the report categorizes people by age and then examines the similarities and differences between workers in the different age groups. Workers are viewed as belonging to one of three age groups: Millennials (who currently account for 35 percent of the overall U.S. workforce, totaling 56 million individuals), Gen Xers (53 million individuals), and Baby Boomers (41 million individuals). Since CompTIA is asking the questions, and because technology, in a very real sense, touches nearly all aspects of modern work, the report largely focuses on the intersection between U.S. workers and information technology (IT). The full report is available to download in PDF format free of charge.