Figuring out your appropriate certification program isn’t easy and involves almost as much studying as preparing for the certification exams themselves. But these programs can have big payouts in terms of job advancement, increases in responsibility and salary. I wrote two posts for Infosec Resources.

In our first post, we presented the issues a manager should consider in building a training program for their company. Training budgets tend to be the first ones to be cut in any economic downturn and often don’t get fully funded even when the economy is improving. But training can also have a significant impact on an enterprise: it can increase the pool of available skills, help pave the way for a department to take on new challenges, improve morale and create a sense of purpose for workers. In this first post, I talk about what are some of the benefits of training and ways to measure them, explore some of the costs, and the four different modalities that you can use to design your own training program.

In the second post, I explore the benefits and costs from the individual’s perspective and what you should expect from a certificate program and how to evaluate a program. This post also has a handy comparison chart that shows your costs and other considerations from the major infosec certs.