Best IT Certifications for 2024

Earning specialized certifications is a surefire way to advance your career in the IT field, regardless of industry or current career level. The right certification validates your skills and knowledge, which makes you more desirable to future employers who want to attract and retain the best employees. Below, we’ll explore the top IT certifications and share how to examine your goals to choose the right path forward. 

We’ve narrowed IT certifications into specific categories to help IT professionals assess what’s available and pursue the best certifications to show their willingness to learn and develop the in-demand career skills employers want.

Database platforms have changed greatly over the years, but database technology remains important for various applications and computing tasks. Available certifications for IT professionals include those for database administrators (DBAs), database developers, data analysts and architects, business intelligence, and data warehousing specialists, and other data professionals.

Obtaining database certifications demonstrates an understanding of database concepts, design, implementation, administration and security. This can boost your credibility in the job market and show potential employers that you have the skills needed to work with databases. The best database certifications include the following:

SAS is one of the world’s leading firms for business analytics, data warehousing and data mining. Today, the SAS Global Certification Program offers 23 credentials across categories including foundation tools, advanced analytics, business intelligence, data management and administration.

SAS programmers remain in high demand, with a quick search of job boards showing thousands of open positions. Obtaining SAS certification shows employers that you are proficient in the company’s popular suite of tools. Some of SAS’s certification programs include the following: 

Many professionals earn certifications to help navigate their career paths. According to the IT Salary Report, 92 percent of information technology professionals have at least one certification.

Cisco Systems is a market leader not only in networking and communications products, but also storage networking and solutions for data centers. Cisco offers a variety of certifications for IT professionals, ranging from entry level credentials to expert-level exams. 

These certifications prepare professionals for Cisco-related careers. A search of job boards reveals thousands of open positions for Cisco experts, underscoring the continued relevance of these skills. Some of Cisco’s certifications include the following:

Dell Technologies remains one of the world’s leading computing companies. In addition to its well-known hardware lineup, Dell also offers solutions for networks, storage, servers, gateways and embedded computing, as well as a broad range of IT and business services.

Becoming certified in Dell products can help make IT professionals competitive in engineering roles for server, virtualization, networking, systems, integration and data security. Additional roles include consultants, account executives, system administrators, IT managers and deployment managers.

In the mobile era, it has become increasingly important for network engineers to support local, remote and mobile users, as well as provide proper infrastructure. The focus on application and app development now leans more toward mobile environments, requiring security professionals to thoroughly address mobility from all perspectives.

Due to the fast-changing nature of mobile technology, not many mobility certifications have become widely adopted. However, a few of the top mobility certifications can help IT professionals stand out in this rapidly evolving field. 

If part of your job includes selling and implementing an IT solution, you may want to pursue the best sales certifications. You’ll show your organization that you’re willing to go above and beyond to reach sales targets.

As remote and computer-based work has become more common, it’s more important than ever that businesses and individuals be able to maintain their hardware. While discussions about potential computer-related jobs often revolve around software work and coding, jumping into the IT field by becoming a computer technician is an excellent starting point.

Today, thousands of hardware technician jobs are available across the country. Entering this industry becomes more accessible for those who acquire computer hardware certifications. These certifications can showcase your expertise and proficiency in the upkeep of computers, mobile devices, printers and other hardware components.

IT pros with solid cloud computing skills continue to be in high demand as more companies adopt cloud technologies. Today, Google Cloud is one of the market leaders in the cloud computing space. 

Regardless of where you are in your IT career, engaging with certification programs can demonstrate your willingness to keep on top of rapidly evolving cloud technologies. To that end, Google has introduced a host of certifications for its cloud platform, including the following: 

In the fast-changing world of technology, it can help to focus on certifications that have stood the test of time. “Evergreen” refers to certifications that remain popular year after year. 

The top evergreen certifications are based on recent pay surveys in IT, reports from IT professionals about certifications they want or pursue the most, and those that appear most frequently in online job postings. Obtaining these credentials is one step toward ensuring that your skills remain relevant for a long time: 

IT governance provides structure for aligning a company’s IT with its business strategies. Organizations faced with compliance rigors always need experienced IT pros who can see the big picture and understand technology risks. This means certified IT governance professionals are likely to remain in high demand.

Earning one of the following certifications proves a commitment to understanding the role of IT governance and its position in a company’s current and future success. Getting certified can validate your expert knowledge and lead to advanced career opportunities.

An IT system administrator is responsible for managing and maintaining the information technology infrastructure within an organization. The position demands sought-after career skills, ranging from configuring and maintaining servers and clients to managing access controls, network services, and addressing application resource requirements.

If you’re in charge of managing modern servers, there’s a long list of tools and technologies that system administrators must master. Obtaining some of the most prominent system administrator certifications can demonstrate your mastery to potential employers. 

ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, was developed to establish standardized best practices for IT services within government agencies. Over the ensuing four decades, businesses of all types embraced, modified, and extended ITIL, shaping it into a comprehensive framework for managing IT service delivery. 

The ITIL framework remains the benchmark for best practices in IT service and delivery management, offering certification programs that cater to IT professionals at all levels. These training and certification courses ensure that IT professionals stay well-prepared for the ongoing evolution in IT service delivery management. There are four certifications in the ITIL certification program:

An IT enterprise architect is responsible for designing and managing the overall structure and framework of an organization’s information technology system. Enterprise architect certifications are among the highest that an IT professional can achieve; fewer than 1 percent ultimately reach this level. 

Enterprise architects are among the highest-paid employees and consultants in the tech industry. These certifications can put IT professionals on a path to many lucrative positions. The average worker earns over six figures annually. Some top enterprise architect certifications are listed below:

To become an enterprise IT architect, you’ll need knowledge of systems deployment, design and architecture, as well as a strong business foundation.

CompTIA is a nonprofit trade association made up of more than 2,000 member organizations and 3,000 business partners. The organization’s vendor-neutral certification program is one of the best recognized in the IT industry. Since CompTIA developed its A+ credential in 1993, it has issued more than two million certifications.

CompTIA certifications are grouped by skill set and focus on the real-world skills IT professionals need. Armed with these credentials, you can demonstrate that you know how to manage and support IT infrastructure. 

A longtime leader in database software, Oracle also offers cloud solutions, servers, engineered systems, storage, and more. The company has more than 430,000 customers in 175 countries. 

Today, Oracle’s training program offers six certification levels that span 16 product categories with more than 200 individual credentials. Considering the depth and breadth of this program — and the number of Oracle customers — it’s no surprise that Oracle certifications are highly sought after. 

Vendor-specific certifications address a particular vendor’s hardware and software. For example, you can pursue Oracle certifications and Dell certifications to become an expert in those companies’ environments.

Business continuity and disaster recovery keep systems running and data available in the event of interruptions or faults. These programs bring systems back to normal operation after a disaster has occurred.

Business continuity and disaster recovery certifications are seeing a healthy uptrend as new cloud-based tools grow in popularity. While business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning have always been essential, they’re becoming more critical than ever — and IT certifications are following suit.

Cisco Bets Big On Virtualization, Blade Servers

After months of speculation, Cisco on Monday officially staked its claim to the blade server market, unveiling a server offering as part of its Unified Computing System, an architecture the San Jose, Calif.-based networking giant said will increase the use of virtualization in data centers.

But Cisco was quick to note that the Unified Computing System goes well beyond a typical blade server play. Instead, Cisco detailed a holistic approach and open eco-system to tie together servers, storage, networking and virtualization.

"This is the future of the data center," said Cisco CEO John Chambers, in an event unveiling the Unified Computing System on Monday. "It will evolve into clouds and change business models forever."

The Cisco Unified Computing System is a solution set that comprises a host of new Cisco products, along with a flurry of contributions from dozens of technology partners.

Chambers said the Unified Computing System will "bring together the compute power, the storage access and the networking capabilities" of the next-generation data center and facilitate Cisco's vision of accessing information from any device, any network, any location at any time.

The new architecture, which Cisco called a "wire once" unified fabric, can ultimately reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, while reducing capital expenditures by up to 20 percent and operational expenses by up to 30 percent compared to legacy data center systems, said Jackie Ross, vice president of Cisco's server and virtualization business unit.

The system will enable the building of next-generation data centers optimized for virtualized resources, Cisco said. As a single system, it is designed to ease data center management while also supporting a host of applications and services from leading partner vendors like BMC, EMC, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat and VMware.

Chambers said the system can provision applications "at the drop of a hat." And Ross added that all told the system can support more than 300 servers and thousands of virtual machines. It can also reduce the number of data center resources, like servers, switches, adapters and cables by up to 50 percent, which ultimately lowers power and cooling costs.

The Unified Computing System includes a host of new Cisco products, foremost two types of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, which are based on the upcoming Intel Nehalem processor. While specific details of the pending blade servers won't be released for a few weeks, Cisco said the servers adapt to new application demands, scale energy use and offer virtualization capabilities. Additional details are being held close to the vest until Intel's official Nehalem launch at the end of March.

Cisco said each blade server uses network adapters for access to the unified fabric and Cisco's "memory-expansion" technology can increase the memory footprint to boost performance and capacity for virtualization and large data set workloads. Cisco also unveiled the UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, which can support up to eight blade servers and up to two of Cisco's new fabric extenders in a 6RU enclosure without the need for additional management modules.

Along with releasing a blade server play, Cisco unveiled UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects, a family of line-rate, low-latency lossless 10 Gbps Cisco Data Center Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet interconnect switches. The switches consolidate I/O within the system. The switches come in 20-port 1RU and 40-port 2RU version and accommodate expansion modules for Fibre Channel and/or 10 Gig E connectivity.

Other components of the Unified Computing System include Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders, which bring unified fabric into the blade-server chassis for up to 10 Gbps connections each between blades and the fabric interconnect, which can ease diagnostics, cabling and management and UCS Network Adapters, which are three types of adapters offered in a mezzanine-card format. The adapters are optimized for virtualization, compatibility with existing driver stacks, or efficient, high performance Ethernet.

Lastly, tying the entire system together, Cisco will release the Cisco UCS Manager, a centralized management console for the Unified Computing System. The UCS Manager is the embedded software that unifies the various components into a seamless, cohesive system. The UCS Manger offers a graphical user interface, a command line interface and an application programming interface to manage all Unified Communication System components and configurations.

Next: VARs React

In addition to the new gear, Cisco will also launch an Authorized Technology Partner Program (ATP) around Unified Computing. Currently, Cisco said it has 250 data center specialized partners, 75 percent of which focus heavily on virtualization, servers and storage, said John Growdon, director of go to market for Cisco worldwide channels. Growdon said roughly 30 to 50 of those partners will be brought into the ATP in its initial launch, with the program opening to more partners soon.

Rob Lloyd, executive vice president designate of worldwide operations for Cisco, said more details of the Unified Computing Systems configurations and solutions will emerge over the coming weeks. Exact availability dates and pricing models were not released on Monday.

"You can't think of this as a blade or a network ... it's a system," Lloyd said, adding the Unified Computing System will be shipped and configured as a single system, not as stand-alone products.

Mario Mazzola, senior vice president of Cisco's server access and virtualization business unit, agreed.

"We don't look at this announcement as a specific product, like a blade server," he said. "We don't think in terms of chassis. We think in terms of global reach."

Unified computing is the third phase in Cisco's five-phased approach to the data center, which started with the first phase of data center networking nearly a decade ago and evolved into the second phase of a unified fabric last year. The fourth and fifth phases will focus on cloud computing, namely private clouds and inter clouds, respectively, Chambers said.

And while the Unified Computing System is central to Cisco's vision for next-generation virtualized data centers, Cisco on Monday also joined forces with what Chambers called a "world class ecosystem" of technology partners to fulfill that vision. Partners like Accenture, BMC Software, EMC, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Red Hat, VMware and a host of others will contribute as UCS evolves.

Technology partners, like VMware, hope the Unified Computing strategy and their contributions facilitate and accelerate virtualizations, increasing typical virtualization utilization beyond the current level of about 30 percent.

"Get people off the dime and accelerate the trend to large-scale virtualization," said VMware CEO Paul Maritz. "There will no longer be any reason you can't take any load in the data center or in the cloud and give it the benefit of virtualization."

Zeki Yasar, enterprise consultant at ePlus, a Herndon, Va.-based solution provider, said Cisco is providing some very interesting technology that, rather than addressing server technology as a whole, instead addresses a hole in how virtual technology is brought into a unified environment.

"A lot of people who are doing virtualization are not bringing it into their production environments because of latency and overhead issues," Yasar said. "Virtualization has addressed some core applications, but not things like databases."

Yasar, who has been quietly working with Cisco's Unified Computing System for some time, said Cisco is bringing hardware-assisted virtualization to the unified computing stack.

"It's expanding virtualization into not only the processors, but also into the entire Cisco platform," he said. "Now enterprise services like databases that don't fly in a virtual environment because of performance issues now can do so. So people who are not deploying virtual infrastructures because they couldn't get the full ability to do all the software services can do it now."

Keith Norbie, director of the storage division of Nexus Information Systems, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based solution provider and partner to both Cisco and VMware, said that, while his company sells a lot of Cisco products, it sees a number of challenges ahead as Cisco moves into a new business.

"The biggest challenge for Cisco is, what's their credibility in this space?" Norbie said. "Who's going to be the first to sell a Cisco server? If it's on the VMware HCL (hardware compatibility list), it might work."

Cisco, by reaching beyond the natural evolution of its core business, does run the risk of overreaching while protecting its existing business from competitors eager to see it fall, Norbie said.

For instance, Norbie said, even as Cisco is reaching into the server market, companies like Juniper Networks are pecking away at its networking market, F5 at its application delivery networking market, Riverbed at WAN optimization, and Checkpoint at firewalls.

Norbie also said Cisco, by reaching too far outside its core business, risks an identity crisis. "It's like Michael Jordon playing baseball," he said, referring to Jordan's temporary retirement from professional basketball to play minor league baseball in the mid-1990s.

Joseph F. Kovar contributed to this story.

An Example Verification Environment for Different Types of Processor Models

Abstract :

Embedded systems are getting significant attention in current integrated circuits due to their direct control on the overall circuits` performance and functional capabilities. Commonly used processors generally provide various types of simulation models to designers to handle verification of the embedded processor with the related system and to find any erroneous cases in early steps of the design. Throughout the development steps such as system design, hdl design and verification, different teams and even members of the same team may prefer different languages and abstraction level models, which cause a great diversity in both methodology and knowledge sharing. This creates great difficulty for the design, verification and firmware teams, preventing them to present a unified methodology that supports all the needs in the same core. The presented approach is based on the initial interest for making processor system verification independent from vendor specific models and creates a unified system that can handle different models with adaptation wrappers on the coding language. With the aid of presented methodology, a unified structure is developed for firmware tests and design verification tests in C language.

This study describes a C code wrapper that supports ARM DSM functional verification and a TLM based verification with a unified test code on ARM CortexM3 processor.

I. INTRODUCTION

The widespread availability and use of various multimedia content supported by different communication standards or applications has created a great need for faster and powerful processing units in embedded systems. This has driven demand for an optimum performance with available processor configurations and improves the importance on processor sub-system verification through all design steps.

Verification of processor itself and related sub-systems with different models is not a question of preference but a need based on different precision granularity expected from the models. For example, system validation and RTL validation of the processor peripherals will be examined by high level model (TLM), processor throughput and impact of processor cycles will be checked by DSM. Additionally, physical verification of the system will be done by provided ARM processor netlist.

The objective of the work presented in this paper, was to build a unified environment for the processor itself and related sub-system, such that verification through different steps could be executed on a wrapper that handles various types of processor models and improves consistency supported by each model with decreased resource usage.

With the aid of this environment, a widely used test language will be selected at the beginning phase and this could be used in firmware and design verification steps without any modification for any model. We have chosen C language as a common test code language and build the flow from specification to header file generation and test design according to the language dependent constraints. Unification of environment is provided by specific wrapper adaptation interfaces for the available ARM DSM and an internally developed TLM model for CortexM3 processor. The methodology that we followed is not strictly dependent to any specific product and would be easily adapted for other models and interfaces with maximum resource saving in overall verification steps. It is a very practical solution to enhance verification of embedded processors with several models without any impact on time or resource consumption.

From idea to realization, it was aimed to build a verification environment that supports many processor models and also can be easily used by other teams with same test code language without any core, TLM - DSM, model knowledge. It was also a short-term objective to deploy this method for the next verification release of the IP in one month.

III. THE SITUATION AT THE START

The project, that the implementation done was a commonly used IP in communication platforms which has some improvements in RTL implementation, processor sub-system and verification methodology. There was a requirement for this project to build a UVM based verification environment with support for multiple processor models. It was also an option to support multiple processor verification model tests with a unified test code. It was a challenge to understand and check if it was feasible to implement this unification without sacrificing any model advantage such as fast execution and easy debugging, but there would be earnings for the whole team by improving efficiency and consistency.

IV. UNIFICATION OF THE ENVIRONMENTS

There are two main parts of the flow;

1. Feasibility Phase: Understanding model behaviors, supported test functions and languages for each model to be used. Developing a common function set consists of generally used and needed functions.

2. Unification Phase: Building the structure and defining the unified functions accordingly. Wrapping separate model environments to support new functions for the unified methodology.

A. Feasibility phase

All the processor models, in the verification environment, needs to be well understood and investigated. That means the functions supported or unsupported by any model needs to be clarified before to prevent any issue in later stages.

Common and needed functions need to be well defined in feasibility phase such as;

Model compilation environment with test codes will also be detailed and listed for smooth integration of additional wrapped environment. Compilation script mechanism and paths will be noted and adaptation of scripts will be done according to the needs of file caching and access mechanisms of the design structure.

Different elaborations snapshots will be defined with some define statements in the scripts to eliminate unwanted behaviors of the design. Those snapshots are needed to provide linking between correct processor instantiated RTL and wrapper interfaces of unification.

It would be first good to have working environments separately and unify them later. We built an environment for ARM DSM in the first place. By using a simple register write/read access test, we verified this standalone environment was ready. Then similarly we built another environment using the TLM instead of ARM DSM and perform similar register access test to verify system behavior was working. The unification part was done afterwards which is defined in the next section. It would also be good for the integrator to have dedicated debugger interface/tool knowledge of the models to overcome problems quickly.

B. Unification phase

Unification is the main step for having a unified test environment supporting different processor models. In our case, ARM DSM and TLM models were used to mimic processor behavior and system interfaces in the design for verification purposes. These two models are different in both operation and structure so we followed the same flow for unification purposes to create a unified environment. Details are given in the following paragraphs for each processor model.

DSM is the model provided by ARM and has its own code compilation and object linking scripts. Initially, we create an alternative list of codes to be compiled by arm compiler to generate instruction list for DSM model. Our wrapper codes are also included in this list that helps the compiler to interpret DSM functions as our defined functions. This could be called as a redefinition of the functions with common names. After this step, writing a new test code with unified functions works properly with arm compiler to compile them as ARM instructions.

Table I includes some example functions of DSM model and their unified conventions. In the implementation period it was decided to keep some DSM functions as the unified naming convention.

TABLE I: EXAMPLE DSM FUNCTIONS FOR UNIFICATION

Figure 1 is a short overview of unification flow.

Figure 1: Overview of unification flow.

TLM functions were more or less similar to DSM functions in functionality but background operation is different. Since we defined the unified language in feasibility step, it was also a kind of redefinition of TLM functions with a wrapper function interface.

Table II includes some example functions of TLM model and their unified conventions.

TABLE II: EXAMPLE TLM FUNCTIONS FOR UNIFICATION

Redefinition of the model specific functions is the most important but not the last part. We also adapted our RTL elaboration and model instantiation parts accordingly to use correct snapshot and use correct wrapper for the model in the C test code. Building such configurable environment also helped us not to be affected by the future updates on both RTL and model sides. For instance, any register update in the RTL is handled by register header file and since we are using a unique access function for registers, we did not need to make any update in the test codes. If we were using model dedicated access functions, they may differ in typing and accessing through the addresses.

Figure 2 shows the elaboration period until test run for unified environment.

Figure 2: Elaboration and snapshot selection for unified environment.

Figure 3 is an example redefinition graph of model dedicated functions for unification.

Figure 3: A function redefinition example for unification.

V. CONCLUSION

We have developed a verification environment which can use the same C test code for different processor models. Here is a list of advantages of our work:

VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Trefor Southwell and ST-Ericsson Zaventem/Belgium firmware team for their extensive support and feedbacks during this work.