MCSE and other evergreen IT

When it comes to IT certifications, a certain set remains at the forefront. If you look at various IT certification salary surveys or reports on the most sought-after IT certifications, you'll see specific names or acronyms pop up again and again. To spell those out explicitly, here's an updated list of the best evergreen IT certifications for 2019.

This guide presents some top IT certifications for 2019, based on recent pay surveys in IT, reports from IT professionals about certifications they want or pursue the most, and those that appear most frequently in online job postings. For the record, "evergreen" is a publishing industry term for a title that keeps on selling year after year. We consider the certifications in this collection to be evergreen, as all show noteworthy longevity in terms of desirability and popularity, and often in associated remuneration.

Our top IT evergreen certifications for 2019 include the CCIE, CCNA, CISSP, PMP, ITIL and MCSE. Below, we'll also review other evergreen IT certifications, including the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) certifications and the CompTIA "Holy Trinity," namely the A+, Network+ and Security+ certifications.

Note: All these certifications are quite different, and range from entry to senior level in terms of the knowledge, skills and experience required to earn them. We present them here in no particular order.

Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE)
The Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) remains one of the most coveted networking certifications available. Internationally recognized, the CCIE is an expert-level credential achievable by only the most skilled, technically proficient and experienced IT networking professionals. All roads in the Cisco certification path lead to the CCIE, making it a career pinnacle and the culmination of years of hard work, training and experience. CCIE credential holders are recognized by peers and employers as experts in their respective networking fields. Such skilled professionals possess superior network engineering skills and can manage and operate large, complex networks, as well as develop creative solutions to complex networking problems across a broad range of circumstances and technologies.