The market values what it values. It really doesn't matter how certified, degreed, skilled, or talented you are, if the market doesn't value them at a rate you can be happy with.

That doesn't mean you're any less certified, degreed, skilled, or talented. Some very smart people are not valued by the market. It only means the market doesn't value the skills as much as you do.

There is a lot of confusion about technical valuation. Chip Camden wrote an article about free software that is not completely irrelevant to this discussion. We like to pick apart details (Are certs valuable, etc.), but there is a larger dynamic going on for this to even come up.

Certs specifically...my suspicion is the market has been flooded by not only people who are attaching alphabet soup to their names, but also with cert offerings themselves from the vendors. The real beneficiaries are the cert vendors. I am certified. I never attached the acronyms to my mail sig, etc....on purpose...but they are on my portfolio/resume. I am not sure I am going through the aggrevation...and the EXPENSE..of keeping them current though because I am not sure they offer any real market value now. There are a bagilion of them now. Which ones can one isolate as being the right ones for him/her?