• Individual goals vary (we want different things from our certifications),
• Job markets are diverse. The CFA is helpful if you want to work in equity research or, say, become a distressed debt analyst. The FRM would be more relevant to a risk manager (but the FRM, at the moment, is probably not a prerequisite for any job). For other Financial Services jobs (e.g., consulting, sales, management), these credentials are elements that complement your overall presentation. Like the MBA (which has suffered some commoditization), they don't buy you advancement per se, rather they enhance your portrait.
• It's getting harder to generalize about job markets, even accounting for their diversity. Almost across the board, there is a higher bar on technical skills (e.g., visual basic) or specialized knowledge (e.g., CPA, SOX)
• Please also note that under the financial certification umbrella, you have more and more choices. Each with their own focus. Just two examples. In alternative investments, we now have the Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst.In performance measurement and evaluation, the CFA Institute recently opened aCertificate in Investment Performance Measurement. Certification fragmentation, I suppose, follows naturally from the trend toward skills specialization.