IT Certifications

Whether IT certifications are worth it draws conflicting answers because the people answering are not describing the same object. No single ladder runs from beginner to expert. The vendor exams in the certifications directory form roughly nine ladders standing next to each other, and the rungs do not interchange. AZ-900 moves a candidate one step up the cloud ladder and no distance at all up the security one. CCNA is not a cheaper route to the CKA. ITIL Foundation and PSM I resemble each other in effort and in the promise made about them, while certifying two different institutions' vocabulary to two different buyers. Almost all the money wasted on exams goes one of two ways: a candidate climbs a ladder nobody within commuting distance hires from, or collects the first rung of four separate ladders and presents the result as a portfolio. The second costs more, because it feels like progress while it happens. Four foundational certificates read to a hiring manager as four abandoned starts; two rungs on one ladder read as a direction. What the certificate does deserves a plain statement, since the marketing never gives one. It does not prove competence, and no interviewer who has held the job treats it as proof. It survives a filter. Faced with several hundred applications and no means of judging them individually, a screener sorts on something unambiguous, and a credential is one of the few lines on a CV that is simply present or absent. That mechanism explains the value and the limit together. A filter not passed is a conversation never had; passing it buys the conversation and nothing more, and the conversation turns on outages the candidate has caused and then repaired. It also explains why the badge loses force the moment a reader can verify the candidate another way. For anyone already employed in IT, a foundational exam is rarely worth its fee on its own, because colleagues can see the work. It earns its fee in three situations: a career changer has no other evidence and needs one; an employer pays; or the exam unlocks something concrete, the way ServiceNow's CSA sits behind a free course that also confers eligibility. Outside those three, the fee is better spent on the associate exam one rung higher, the rung that job postings name.

Nine ladders, side by side

What it costs to stay certified

Every fee on an exam page is a starting price, and reading it as a purchase is the error that catches careful people. Validity runs from one year to five, and above that sits a lifetime tier. Microsoft's associate and expert certificates expire after a single year and renew free through an assessment on Microsoft Learn, which is generous and also an annual obligation that is easy to forget. AWS and Cisco run three years and renew by examination: the current version again, or something higher. Red Hat works the same way and calls a lapsed certificate non-current rather than expired. CNCF gives the CKA a two-year life and no credit-based way out, so the only route is another sitting. LPI runs five years and accepts a membership with development units instead of a retake. The security and management bodies work differently: CISSP, CISA, CISM, CEH and PMP each combine continuing-education credits across a three-year cycle with a maintenance or renewal fee payable whether or not anything was learnt, and EC-Council revokes a lapsed CEH rather than suspending it. Salesforce charges nothing but requires a release module every year. ServiceNow added an annual maintenance fee for its mainline certifications in 2026, on top of the per-release delta exam. Only ISTQB, Scrum.org, GitHub Foundations, Microsoft's fundamentals and CompTIA Tech+ stop asking altogether. Added up over a working life, a credential kept current for decades can cost more than it did to earn, which almost no preparation course mentions, and which is the best reason for holding fewer certificates than one is capable of passing: the ones nobody asks about can lapse. A certificate outweighs experience in three cases. When the experience cannot be checked: self-taught projects, freelance work and jobs at employers a recruiter has never heard of are invisible to a filter, and a vendor exam makes them legible. When a contract or a public tender names the credential. And at a change of platform, because years of on-premise administration say nothing about whether someone can be trusted with a cloud budget. Everywhere else experience wins. Two notes on the links, since they bear on the advice: the vendors' own learning paths are free, and every exam page links them without commission, because for a good share of readers they are sufficient; course and practice-test links are affiliate links. Fees, durations and retirement dates sit on the individual exam pages, each dated to its reading from the vendor. The certifications directory is the place to start for a reader who knows their ladder; the IT, cloud and security path for one still working out where on the sequence they stand.