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I work in the information security profession as an IT Auditor. Within the last year, I obtained both my CISA certification and passed the CISSP exam, becoming Associate of ISC^2.

I am now thinking of my strategy for my end of year evaluation. The above accomplishments are very relevant to what I do professionally. While I have researched the salary differential of someone with these accomplishments, I am not looking to move to a new job, as I love my current role. Prior to becoming CISA certified, my boss has always recognized my technical skills in core areas such as threat modeling and security risk assessment. He himself holds a related certification, CISM and also comes from a technical background.

How can I best quantify the value of these accomplishments internally at my employer for my annual performance evaluation?

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  • Are you able to bill out for more or take on tasks you could not have without the certifications?
    – paparazzo
    Nov 3, 2018 at 15:19
  • Unless there are either some really well-defined salary brackets in your company or there's a legal requirement to have the certification to do certain work, it would probably be really hard to come up with any remotely objectively monetary value for the certification. You'd probably have to follow the general steps for determining your salary (as per the linked post), and take into account the specific certification where applicable (look at salaries of jobs where it's required, for example).
    – Bernhard Barker
    Nov 3, 2018 at 15:24
  • did you pay for the certifications? or did your boss?
    – mhoran_psprep
    Nov 4, 2018 at 11:57
  • @mhoran_psprep - I paid for them, but they are reimbursable by the company
    – Anthony
    Nov 5, 2018 at 4:27
  • @JoeStrazzere, for CISA, it was an expectation when I was hired that I would eventually receive this certification. For CISSP, several of my colleagues in our team have it and almost all in our InfoSec team has it including director and CISO. CISSP certification is also very common among InfoSec practitioners in my past work experience
    – Anthony
    Nov 5, 2018 at 4:28

2 Answers 2

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Qualifications fit you to do a job. What you do in the job and how you do it fit you to receive a salary. I suggest you remember this and do not make the flawed assumption that the qualifications fit you for a salary. Negotiation might then involve asking how you can do more on the basis of the new qualification, and whether that more justifies a rise in salary.

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What you need to answer is "how do the certifications improve my value to the company?" For example:

  • Do they let you personally undertake regulated work you previously couldn't do?
  • Did you learn new skills or significantly improve existing ones while studying for the certifications?
  • Do they give your company a sales advantage? ("We have 5 super-certified engineers to work on this project")
  • Do they let your company gain additional "certifications"? For example, me being AWS certified means my employer is a AWS consulting partner.
  • etc

If you can't express how your certifications improve your value to the company, then it's probably worth considering why you got them. You don't make it clear in your question whether this was something suggested by your employer or something you did on your own time (and money). If your employer asked you to do it, you can always fall back on "got that certification you wanted me to" - but consider adding next time why you're being asked to do things!

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