What is the future of VoIP and what are the certifications available for it?

Hmmm… Let's see: consider that VoIP has grown from nothing to a multibillion dollar industry in under five years, and that most experts predict that by 2015 between 35-50% of the global telephone market (worth in excess of $100B per year) will use IP telephony. VoIP therefore seems to have a bright, assured future, one moreover that promises to continue its insane growth and expansion for the foreseeable future. As for certifications on VoIP that are currently available, you can find VoIP coverage in many Cisco certs, with several specializations focusing more or less exclusively on IP telephony, likewise for those infrastructure/telephony vendors who've jumped onto the VoIP bandwagon (Nortel, Avaya, Lucent, and many others). There's a vendor neutral "convergence" credential available from www.prosofttraining.com that seems to have great content, but I can't find much information about the size of the population of cert holders, or growth rates or uptake in the marketplace. NACSE (National Association of Communications Systems Engineers) and NARTE (National Association of Radio and Television Engineers) offer wireless and/or telecomm certs that touch on VoIP issues. Even training companies like Global Knowledge, Learning Tree, and so forth offer their own private-label certs that deal with VoIP stuff. For the most comprehensive list of related certs, visit www.gocertify.com, then view the contents of the "communications" category in the categorized view of its certification database.