IT Certifications

Ask whether IT certifications are worth it and the answers conflict, because the people answering are not describing the same object. Nothing in our data supports the idea of a single ladder running from beginner to expert. The 55 exams we track across 20 vendors form roughly nine ladders standing next to each other, and the rungs do not interchange. AZ-900 moves you 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 is hiring from, or a candidate collects a first rung on four separate ladders and presents the result as a portfolio. The second is the costlier mistake, because it feels like progress while it is happening. Four foundational certificates read to a hiring manager as four abandoned starts. Two rungs on one ladder read as a direction. It helps to be blunt about what the certificate does, since the marketing never is. It does not prove competence, and no interviewer who has held the job treats it as proof. What it does is survive a filter. Confronted with several hundred applications and no means of judging them individually, a screener must sort 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. The value is real: a filter you do not pass is a conversation you never get to have. The limit is that passing it buys the conversation and nothing more, and the conversation turns on outages you have caused and then repaired. It also explains why the badge loses force the moment a reader can verify you some other way, which leads to the first position here worth disputing. For anyone already employed in IT, a foundational exam is rarely worth its fee on its own. Colleagues can see your work; the certificate tells them nothing they do not already know. It earns its money in three situations. A career changer has no other evidence and needs one. An employer pays, in which case the argument is over. Or the exam unlocks something concrete, the way ServiceNow's CSA sits behind a free course that also makes you eligible for the exam. Outside those three, the fee is better spent on the associate exam one rung higher, because that is the rung job postings actually 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 mistake that catches otherwise careful people. Validity across our records runs from one year to five, and beyond that sits a genuine 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 you will forget. AWS and Cisco run three years and renew by examination: retake the current version, or pass 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 offers 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 are a different animal: 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 you learn anything, 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+ genuinely stop asking. Add the cycles up over a working life and a credential kept current for decades can cost more than it did to earn in the first place. Almost no preparation course mentions this, and it is the strongest argument for holding fewer certificates than you are capable of passing: let the ones nobody ever asks about lapse. So when does a certificate genuinely beat experience? 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, in which case there is nothing to argue about. And at the moment you change platform, because years of on-premise administration say nothing about whether you can be trusted with somebody's cloud spend. Everywhere else experience wins, and it should. Two notes on how this site is paid, 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 belong on the individual exam pages with the date we read them from the vendor, not here, where they would quietly go stale. Start at the certifications directory if you already know your ladder, or the IT, cloud and security path if you have yet to work out where on that sequence you currently sit.