Like I said, there are many, many tech certification vendors out there. I found it to be absolutely overwhelming. I have created a Recommended Certification Vendors list for what I believe to be the best vendors right now. This list is comprised of esteemed organizations and leading tech companies that certify tech professionals in the most sought-after skills in the industry. Below is the criteria I used to make this list.
The vendors I have selected offer tech certifications made for tech professionals. We are never punished for learning something highly technical, even if it isn’t directly applicable to our current or desired job function. In this industry, everything is connected. We are not better off for only knowing a small slice of it.
Some things that I’ve completely omitted from this site are programming and design certifications. I don’t think that certification is worth it when it comes to coding and design. I would instead focus on building projects and putting together a solid professional portfolio.
Some certification vendors do not make their certification process generally available to the public. Remember that just because we might be able to sign up for a certification exam, it does not mean that we can access the vendor’s training materials to prepare for it. I consider a vendor to be restrictive if their training is extremely expensive, unavailable in a self-paced format of any kid, or only available to corporate customers or users with a verified corporate email address.
Some certification vendors provide commercial products that hold a smaller market share or are not positioned favorably on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for their respective market segments. This also includes certification vendors that offer products with no significant competition, but are also not widely adopted in the industry.
What about certification vendors that do not offer commercial products? There’s an abundance of organizations that offer certification and training as their main product. Prevalence doesn’t apply here very much, but reputation does. The vendors that I’ve included in this list are established and trusted.
In my opinion, these vendors currently offer the best certification opportunities for the average tech professional. I’ve broken them down by category for folks who may want to focus on one specific area within the industry.
Although their proprietary training portal is extremely expensive, Red Hat is listed here because there are affordable comprehensive course guides available as books for the RHCSA and RHCE.
There are vendors that didn’t quite make the main list, but we still should be aware of them. They can be further broken down into four distinct categories.
Vendors that offer certification opportunities for things that I do not consider to be entirely relevant for most tech pros. The focus for them is mostly on business analysis, CRM, process, GRC, and management. For anyone looking to shift gears and potentially move into something more business-related or process-related, these could help.
These vendors offer certification opportunities for rather specific products within the industry. That alone does not mean that we should disregard them. For some of us, these could be much more relevant than anything I have on the Recommended Certification Vendors. Some of these vendors also make their certification process rather restrictive, but I did not want to include them in the Restrictive category as those vendors offer certification opportunities for widely adapted technologies.
By obscure, I more mean “relatively obscure”. These vendors are not complete unknowns. That being said, their certification programs are less notable than the vendors on the Recommended Certification Vendors list. Some of these will probably move up at some point. There’s a limit to just how many cybersecurity certification vendors can be at the top. It will be tough displacing CompTIA, ISC2, ISACA, OffSec, and albeit rather pricey GIAC.
Includes vendors that either restrict their training materials to corporate accounts, do not offer self-paced learning options, or make the training materials unaffordable for the average student. I would put almost all of these somewhere on the Recommended Certification Vendors list if they made their training materials and certification opportunities more available.
There is so much more to being a successful tech professional than chasing certifications. Obviously, I think they are valuable overall, but what really matters is whether or not we can do our jobs well. Not all of the skills we need to know can be measured with certifications. It is imperative that we work on our soft skills. Being personable is often more valuable than being certified.
I had never heard of many of these vendors before starting this website. Every month I’ll probably discover a new one. Because I want to create as definitive of a list as I can, I will only exclude vendors that are objectively bad. That being said, if you think I’m excluding one that belongs on this list, let me know! It’s likely not intentional. My LinkedIn profile is linked in the footer.
Regarding the categorization above, all of this is nothing more than my opinion. Feel free to create your own list based off of your own preferences and criteria. Hopefully this is helpful in getting you started.