Illustration: Dan Page

Congratulations. You’ve got a bachelor’s, a master’s, and maybe even a doctorate in engineering, not to mention years of work experience. But do you need to jump on the certificate bandwagon?

Well, it depends.

Certifications confirming your proficiency in certain technologies from hardware and software vendors—such as Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE), or Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE)—can give you a leg up on the competition. They can also provide you with greater command of a particular technology and bump your salary by thousands of dollars, especially in the information technology industry. But they still should be regarded as a complement to education, work experience, and related skill sets, not as a replacement.

“Certifications alone are not enough to make a viable candidate—youalso need work experience,” says Katherine Spencer Lee, the executive director of Robert Half Technology, an international provider of IT professionals, headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. Still, she adds, “if you’re competing for a new job or a promotion at your current company and your skills are comparable to those of the competition, certifications can provide a competitive edge over the other candidates. It’s also proof to employers that you have the drive and commitment to complete goals and stay current in an industry where change is constant.”

Although the Robert Half Technology 2006 Salary Guide notes that certain credentials can push salaries 5 to 12 percent higher than average, that’s not always the case. Engineers need to be strategic in navigating the oversaturated certification landscape.

Many vendors use certification as a way to influence the marketplace, because engineers with certificates for specific products will tend to want to use the knowledge they have paid for rather than to explore new options. This fact of life has led to “an explosion of different vendor certifications,” says Joel Burchett, an IT systems specialist with ChaCha Search, a search engine start-up in Carmel, Ind. “There are well over 100 entry-level computer science–related certifications, which require recertification every time there’s an upgrade. It is starting to border on the absurd.”

Deciding if certifications are right for you, or which ones you should acquire, requires weighing the cost and time of the courses you’ll have to take against marketplace factors and career goals. Certifications run from US $1700 to $8000 for three- to five-day courses, or several hundred dollars for books, training materials, and practice exams if you choose to teach yourself.

Although most certifications focus on IT, they do exist for other areas, like project management and health care information systems. Vendor-neutral certifications—from the international Computing Technology Industry Association, in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., for example—might be more appropriate for people anticipating career changes or for those who don’t want to be tethered to one product or company.