IT Certifications and Talent Pricing

ZDNet has a guest post from Erik Eckel about IT certifications. And it is striking how most deal with development and IT infrastructure areas - with Microsoft and Cisco deserving plenty of credit for a number of certifications.

Glaringly absent are certifications from the big ERP players. A SAP MM consultant should be as fungible as a Microsoft SQLServer resource. I would argue in that vacuum, the Big 5 accounting firms and other outsoucers have continued to use the "skills shortage" excuse for higher rates even after more than a decade and hundreds of thousands of ERP projects around the world.  And even the offshore firms expect a premium for those skills because the "ceiling" above them from the Western firms has stayed high.