“There is nothing like hands-on experience.” – For many years, profession has been the source of constant income in everyone’s life. Getting a job has become really competitive and getting a good job is really hard. Experience is always the best way to learn stuff over the job. But not everyone gets an opportunity to work in the same field right from the beginning. In such cases and other, certifications are considered as alternative form of experience. There are many hands-on certification providers/vendors who help the InfoSec professionals gain experience during the training period. Although, this does not compensate over-the-job experience, this does help provide a baseline for the professional to continue with research or career.
Our goal is not to throw a bunch of certifications in a meaningless way, but to categorize them in a skill oriented view point. Let us list the certifications based on the skills that you would like to learn. In that way, it would help you choose the certifications based on the skills you would like to learn for working in InfoSec jobs.
There are other forms of security such as physical security, which helps in protecting devices and documents from being accessed by unwanted users. Though this does not directly fall under Information Security, they do aid in supporting data security to a certain extent by physically securing the documents and so on. Hence, we would not only be seeing the certifications that fall under the InfoSec, but others that help in attaining a secured atmosphere too.
SANS, Security Certified Program, ASIS, (ISC)2, ISACA, CompTIA, Cisco, TruSecure, Mile2, EC-Council and others are well known organizations for training and certifying professionals with the skills that are required to work in InfoSec jobs. Some of these are good at practical skills and hands-on stuff and some are good at semantics. For a job in InfoSec a professional would require a mixture of both.
InfoSec@The University of Georgia has a good listing on the certifications in our field. This listing would provide a basic idea on how these certifications can be evaluated based on your requirement, your job requirements and your goals. Hands-on experience is provided through some of these certs and some of them provide a good theoretical foundation.