Thank you for sharing your experience. I think there is a lot of truth in what you said. It is probably very situation dependent - in my case getting that first cert and paying out of pocket is how I broke in from IT Ops and got my first security consulting gig. The resulting pay bump paid for the cost of the cert in 6 months. For all certs thereafter I've had my employers pay for it as part of a benefits package. Obviously this is only a single data point, but many of my colleagues have similar stories so I feel like it can't be completely unique to me. YMMV.