A comment from a friend caught my attention the other day. He said, “It seems like the more education I have, the less I make.” Certifications: Why They MatterEarly on in my career, I was making minimum wage as a technician, which was $4.25 an hour at the time. I hadn’t completed college, and my prospects seemed a bit dim. I looked through job after job, but most of them wanted certifications. After a little while, I noticed a pattern. Many required the Microsoft Certified Professional certification. So, I invested a few thousand dollars and took it. Shortly after, I was able to land a job that added $20k a year to my salary! When you’re making $4.25/hr, that’s a huge jump.Certifications such as the Cisco Certified Network Professional are highly valued today. According to Payscale.com, the salary for a CCNP certified professional starts at $41,022 and ranges up to $133,590 depending on location and seniority. A Project Management Professional (PMP) certification might get you anywhere from $59k-$180k depending on your location and position. So why are employers willing to pay that much? Well, they know that these certifications mean that you know what you’re doing, and they can bill out your time at higher rates. At the end of the day, when your employer makes more money, you make more money, so anything you can do to boost your billing rate will help you make more. That’s why certifications matter. Certifications: Why They Don’t MatterAt this point in my career, I have lost count of the number of initials behind my name. CC, CL, ACB, ALS, MS1, MS2, MS3, MCP, PMP, MCSE+I, A+, CLC, CCNA, CCNP, CCDA…they all run together after a while. The last certification I got I said cool, stuck the certificate in my drawer, and forgot about it. At some point, additional certifications have a very minimal impact on your income or ability for you or your company to charge more for your services.Once you hit that point, certifications no longer matter that much to you. It’s not that you shouldn’t take the courses to stay sharp and stay on top of the latest products and research, it’s just that it won’t immediately translate into additional cash in your pocket. You or your employer may not be able to start billing out at twice your regular rate just because you added a few more initials to your name when you already have thirty letters behind it.
I asked a group of six-figure earners how long they had been at their current job, and out of over three hundred responses, more than 2/3 told me they had been there more than five years. It not only requires taking the proper courses to improve your earning power, but you also must do the work and use what you’ve learned to bring value to your clients. Focus on Delivering Value to Increase Your Earning AbilityYour income earning ability is limited only by what people are willing to pay for it which is why certifications can be a very wise investment. Unfortunately, at some point people start to say well if John can get the job done just as well at half the price you’re charging, it’s not worth paying twice that just because you had a bit more training, so eventually certifications stop mattering as much as they did when you were starting your career.If you want to increase your earning potential, yes you should invest in certifications early on in your career, but then you want to start focusing on how you can deliver more value to your employer or clients. When you can deliver enough value to enough people, your income levels can go off the charts. Think of things like the One Funnel Away Challenge, where people paid in $100 to go through a course. There were over 4,300 people in the group when I took the challenge. Do the math on that, $100 * $4,300 = $430,000 for a thirty day challenge. And there will be more next time. Why? Because participants stand to make a lot more than $100 from the lessons they learn in that class. It’s a no brainer to invest in things like that when you can pay in $100 and potentially make thousands from what you learned, so it’s good for both you and the person delivering the class. You’d be happy to give me a $100 if I gave you back $1000 or something you desperately wanted, right? That’s how delivering value works. When you find ways to deliver more value to your clients or employer, your income will go up. Whether that’s by increasing your skills through various courses, or by creating and selling things that help others, if you are providing a lot more value than what you are charging, both you and your customer or employer will be happy. source https://www.personalgrowthchannel.com/2019/04/certifications-why-they-matter-and-why.html Via https://personalgrowthchannel.tumblr.com/post/184462094464
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