“They are not useless, but they should no longer be treated as signals of senior security leadership,” Bird says.
Other credentials that are less useful as differentiators for CISOs in 2026 include single-vendor, product-specific certifications. Deep expertise in one specific firewall or endpoint solution might have been valuable in the past, but for someone in a CISO role, it just doesn’t carry a lot of weight.
“At the CISO level, it’s rarely decisive now, architectures are heterogeneous, and we’re increasingly buying platform outcomes, not hero products,” Argyle says. “These certs are fine for specialists, but they don’t move the needle much for an executive.”
Courses that focus purely on memorizing standards and passing exams — without requiring participants to grapple with real-world trade-offs — are also of diminishing value at the executive level. “As a CISO you’re expected to turn compliance into outcomes, not just recite clauses from a standard,” Argyle says.
For CISOs, though, certifications are necessary but not sufficient. They need to be backed by experience. Employers are looking for leaders who can run security programmes end-to-end, make tough trade-offs under pressure, manage incidents with confidence, and engage with the board with confidence. In a competitive job market, a long list of certifications won’t get anyone far unless it’s backed by real-world experience.
