Countless IT workers have risen in the ranks, many as high as CIO, without having earned a single vendor certification.

But let's set that aside for a moment and explore why, in my firm's ongoing IT-skills pay survey of 62,000 North American IT professionals, average pay declined 0.1% in the past 12 months for certification and rose nearly 8% for noncertified IT skills. And let's see why the number of new certifications received in the United States was down 18% last year, according to Brainbench's 2006 Global Skills Report.

Certifications are losing their luster. We speak regularly with more than 1,800 employers in our IT workforce research, and they tell us that not being certified isn't a big deal if a job candidate has proven technical skills and other important strengths -- business, customer and interpersonal -- in the right proportion to the job. Moreover, employers want workers experienced in their industry and with specific systems, software and solutions, and who can quickly deliver what customers want. They're especially keen on workers who flourish under tough deadlines and can handle a certain amount of organizational discomfort.

IT career advancement has become like a jigsaw puzzle. Certification is only one piece, giving way to clusters of critical attributes that define the modern IT role.

Certifications are more concentrated in networking, systems administration, database, and security jobs and careers. How are they doing in the certified vs. noncertified pay sweepstakes? No different: Noncertified networking skills grew 2.5% in value in 2006, but pay for more than 40 networking certifications declined an average of nearly 4%. The value of systems-related certifications dropped 2%. In the last half of 2006, pay for 27 IT security certifications fell 2.1%.