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Chart 11. Do You Believe Your Company Will Hire More Technical Professionals in the Next 12 Months?

How important will Cisco certification be in those hiring situations? As shown in Chart 12, below, 44 percent of respondents said the credentials will probably play a role. Another 38 percent said they didn’t know. Only 16 percent of people reported that certification wouldn’t make a difference.

Chart 12. Will Cisco Certification Be Part of the Qualifications?

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About a tenth of respondents said they’ve been unemployed in the last year. Just a third of those have found new employment. The average length of unemployment ran nearly five months. That’s a month longer than the average reported in our last results.

The job outlook remains fairly positive among respondents. When asked how they feel about “job security” over the next 12 months, on a scale of one to seven, with seven being the most optimistic, the average came in at a respectable 5.1.

In other areas of work, respondents profess a mixed level of satisfaction. While the overall work they’re doing rated a 5.4 and co-workers received a 5.3, company management came in at a relatively low 4.2 rank; direct management rated a more upbeat 4.9.

Compensation came close to company management in being a sore spot with respondents with a ranking of 4.3. Only 17 percent of people consider their earnings above average compared to others in IT. Forty one percent said they believe they’re earning less than average.

Of those who considered themselves paid better than most, slightly more than a third of respondents believe that certification played some role in that. A third say certification had no role, and the remaining third say they don’t know.

Cross Skills

Although analysts predict that Cisco faces a healthy battle to retain its share in the router and switch market, it won’t be because it has lost the mindshare of its corps of technical experts. Most respondents consider their primary expertise to be in Cisco products.

Chart 13 shows the top 10 categories of experience—besides Cisco—reported in our survey results.

Within the Cisco product lineup, expertise abounds in many areas. Although the primary areas of talent for the Cisco technical community are focused on routers and switches, security devices get a lot of attention, as does wireless. Chart 14 shows the top 15 areas of experience professed by respondents.

Motivational Factors

While personal pride plays a major role in obtaining certification, as we’ve already reported, it also plays a big part in why respondents say they do their jobs well. More than half of people said personal pride and/or enjoyment of the job motivates them. Only 18 percent said compensation was the major motivator. An even smaller eight percent said they wanted to help the company they work for, as spelled out in Chart 15.

Chart 15. What Most Motivates You to Do Your Job Well?

That lack of a strong bond to the company that employs them may explain in part why a whopping 41 percent of respondents said they’re actively seeking new employment outside their current organization. Another six percent said they’re looking internally for a new job. And four percent want to become self-employed.

The Self-Employed

About five percent of respondents said they’re currently self-employed. Whereas the average number of hours worked among all respondents was 45, those who are self-employed said they put in 30 billable hours. (We didn’t ask how many additional hours they worked to keep their businesses running.)

The length of the latest consulting project reported among these people was six months.

Sixty percent of self-employed Cisco professionals contract directly with their clients. Six percent work through brokers or IT placement firms.” The rest say they do both.

The average hourly rate is $91. Those who primarily work through a job shop receive an hourly rate of $71, while the job shop charges clients an average of $104.

Company and Personal Matters

About half of respondents said they work for a company with fewer than 1,000 employees, and half said they work for companies larger than that. That explains why the median—or midway point—for company size was 1,000. Yet the average size of company reported was 16,776, a dramatic difference—the large companies are quite large. A third of Cisco professionals are employed by organizations that exceed 5,000 employees.

Chart 16 shows the top nine types of organizations who employ Cisco technical professionals, as reported by respondents.

Respondents have held their current jobs for an average of four years. That’s also about how long they’ve been working with Cisco technologies in one form or another. They have an average of nearly seven years in a job that specifically involves computer networking or internetworking.

Cisco professionals are overwhelmingly male (92.5 percent). They average 38 years of age and most have graduated from college. Surprisingly, not all respondents live and work in a major metropolitan area. Chart 17 shows the breakdown.

Final Thoughts

It’s a tough time to be a technical professional in the United States. There’s no certainty that it’ll be easy to find employment; and once you do, there’s no guarantee that your job won’t be shuttled out of house in a quick executive move to cut costs. Yet the fact is that money isn’t the single biggest motivator for those in IT. A love of technology, a passion for solving problems, these are what drive people to stay in the field. If you’re entering the field strictly for the pay, you’re making a mistake, since top pay is no longer a certainty.

Even so, the salaries held by Cisco certified professionals are at the top end of the scale for those who design, implement and maintain networking technology. That means it’ll continue to be a draw for those seeking a quick route to big riches in high tech. If you’re considering Cisco certification, plan to go beyond the entry-level step. CCNAs are common enough nowadays to make it of lesser value to hiring managers. If you already possess the CCNA, you can read the numbers for yourself. Those with the more premium titles continue reaping the greater rewards.

If you’re already at one of those higher levels, maybe it’s time to hone another type of skill—the ability to translate business needs into technical output and technology into business drivers. That unique quality of being able to communicate about both tech and business will set you apart from the other IT hands in your company. And every technical professional could use a little good marketing help these days.

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If you have questions or comments about "The Job Market," contact editor@tcpmag.com.