Last month, I reported on the results of Foote Partners' most recent skills pay survey, which found that VoIP, storage/storage-area networking and Gigabit Ethernet were the top-3 highest paying, non-certified network-related skills for the three-months ended Oct. 1. If you want a piece of the high-flying salary but don't know the first thing about those technologies - training is where you start.

Today we look at VoIP training options and issues, and the next few newsletters will look at storage/storage-area networking, and Gigabit Ethernet training.

VoIP training falls into two camps: training for vendor-specific certifications, such as designations managed by VoIP equipment vendors Cisco, Avaya and Nortel, among others. The other is VoIP training that may not result in a certification but where students learn about the fundamentals of VoIP and issues surrounding implementation and deployment. Unlike the training for vendor-specific certifications, these courses don't focus on one product. Suppliers of such vendor-neutral training include Global Knowledge, TRA and Teracom Training Institute.

Although vendor-neutral training does not currently offer students the opportunity to become certified, CompTIA, which develops vendor-neutral certifications such as A+ and Network+, has been working on developing its Convergent Technologies Certification since the beginning of this year. According to CompTIA, the process should take 12 months. The goal is to produce a vendor-neutral certification that demonstrates VoIP or convergence skills. You can read more about this initiative in a newsletter I wrote about it when the project first began: "CompTIA creating VoIP certification."

Vendor-neutral training is a good place to start for IT pros who are VoIP novices and business executives who been charged with evaluating or planning a VoIP initiative.

"People who attend our intensive short courses are generally not technicians who set up and operate the machines but instead business professionals at a higher level in the organization," says Eric Coll, CEO and founder of Teracom Training. "After taking Teracom training, graduates feel much more confident discussing architectures and alternatives with their internal engineering staff and discussing products with salespeople."

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.