Single-Serving Certifications: Yet Again with More Bites of Discrete Data from the CertMag Salary Survey

There were more than 900 certifications included in the most recent Salary Survey conducted by our friends at Certification Magazine. And more than 5,000 individuals from 99 different countries participated in the survey. Put all of those numbers together and you get an impressively large amount of data.

Lots of that data gets reported, both in Certification Magazine itself and online at CertMag.com. Even with somewhere around 75 additional Salary Survey articles appearing at the website in the course of each year, however, there's still a mountain of data that doesn't really get used for anything at all.

That's why today we have a fat serving of Salary Survey leftovers for you. These are odds and ends that ordinarily would get swept into the digital dustbin and be winked out of existence by the DELETE key. Sometimes it's interesting, of course, to look around at the (data) dump and see what ended up there.

Today we have a dozen rejects, 12 randomly chosen certifications each held by exactly one — and only one — individual who responded to the survey. We've also tossed in a few facts about the one survey respondent who holds each of these lonely credentials.

We hope you enjoy these oddments. If this batch is well-received, then we may randomly publish other tidbits that are passed along to us throughout the year.

NOTE: This is our seventh time serving up some 2020 Salary Survey leftovers. If you missed the most recent batch, click here to have a taste.

1) HDI Desktop Advanced Support Technician — This one is held by a man who lives in South Africa. He is between the ages of 35 and 44 and has an annual salary of less than $20,000 or less than R331,886. The highest level of formal education he has completed is post-high school technical training.

2) HDI Support Center Team Lead — This one is held by a man who lives in Indiana. He is between the ages of 55 and 64 and has an annual salary of between $62,500 and $64,499. The highest level of formal education he has completed is an bachelor's degree.

3) Red Hat Certified Specialist in Advanced Automation: Ansible Best Practices — This one is held by a man who lives in North Carolina. He is between the ages of 45 and 54 and has an annual salary of between $130,000 and $134,999. The highest level of formal education he has completed is a bachelor's degree.

4) Riverbed Certified Performance Engineering (RCPE): Performance Foundations — This one is held by a man who lives in Virginia. He is between the ages of 45 and 54 and has an annual salary of between $175,000 and $179,999 The highest level of formal education he has completed is a doctorate.

5) Riverbed Certified Performance Engineering (RCPE): Branch & Datacenter Network Configuration - Professional — This one is held by a man who lives in South Korea. He is between the ages of 35 and 44 and has an annual salary of between $47,500 and $49,999 or between ?54,961,775 and ?57,853,343. The highest level of formal education he has completed is an associate's degree.

6) Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer — This one is held by a man who lives in Texas. He is between the ages of 35 and 44 and has an annual salary of between $165,500 and $169,999. The highest level of formal education he has completed is a master's degree.

7) Palo Alto Networks Certified Cybersecurity Associate (PCCSA) — This one is held by a man who lives in Virginia. He is between the ages of 25 and 34 and has an annual salary of between $60,000 and $62,499. The highest level of formal education he has completed is post-high school technical training.

8) Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Administrator (PCNSA) — This one is held by a man who lives in India. He is between the ages of 35 and 44 and has an annual salary of between $85,000 and $87,499, or between ?6,214,651 and ?6,397,362. The highest level of formal education he has completed is post-high school technical training.

And that's all we have for you. Over the course of seven articles, we've introduced you to 80 different IT certifications with a total representation of one certified professional in the 2020 Salary Survey conducted by Certification Magazine. Which is not to say that those 80 credentials were the only one-offs in the survey.

There were 56 further credentials tied to single survey respondent about whom only partial data was available. And there were 93 more lone wolf credentials on top of that, which we set aside because they were held, usually as cluster of certs from a single provider, by an individual who had already been featured in this series.

Perhaps most impressively, 61 of those 93 are claimed by single person, a woman between the ages of 35 and 44 who lives in Pennsylvania and has a master's degree. It's astonishing to think of one person holding that many IT certifications, and maybe all we really uncovered is an elaborate survey prank. (Are elaborate survey pranks a thing?)

If our mysterious lady of IT certification really is out there somewhere (in Pennsylvania) with her more than five dozen certifications, that we're incredibly impressed — and we salute her!