2 out of 4 previous employers (I'm a freelancer now) gave me a raise whenever I passed an MCP exam. That's enough motivation for me, since it's not very hard to pass MCP exams (at least MSCD related ones) when you have decent practical experience.
Well, MCP just means you've passed one or more certification exams. My current employer is a gold partner with MS, and as a result, we need to have 2+ people with "higher" certifications, such as MCSD, MCAD or MCPD. It saves our company about $50k/year in software licensing. And even though our company hands out a $500 bonus per test passed (plus reimbursement of test and prep materials, and another $1k-1500 for each certification level achieved), only 2 of us at the office are "bothering" to keep updating our certifications/credentials. The other guys say they're "interested" but I think they're holding out for more money.
