Enjoying the Microsoft Certification Game

I was recently Studying a Bootcamp class which focuses on taking the exams necessary to gain official certification. It’s a gruelling type of class with hours typically from 8am to 8pm and beyond. Tough for instructors and expecially for students. Some Bootcamps last for 13 days. Thankfully the SQL Server version lasts 5 days. But at the end of the class, hopefully you are certified.

For the “MCITP Training : Database Administrator” certification you needed to pass 3 exams for SQL Server 2005. Now you only need to pass two for SQL 2008. If you are upgrading your MCITP from SQL Server 2005 you only need to take one. Easier said than done.

Of course, knowledge and experience is the key and many of the questions are designed to discover who has the skills necessary to do the job. There are multiple choice questions and “simulations” which allow you to navigate through the tools (or something that looks like them!) to “prove” you know what you are doing. Microsoft has done the ground-work by defining the skills to be measured and you can purchase practice exams to test yourself against the clock or in “learning mode” as you get used to the style of questions.

I am looking forward to the new style “Howler” peformance-based exams to be released for SQL Server. The idea is that the candidates have to demonstrate their skills with the real product. A server is failing and you have to fix it. You are marked on whether the problem has been fixed or not, not on answering academic questions. Demonstrate your real-life skills. You either have them or you don’t.

I was working on developing this style of exam many years ago, only to be told by Microsoft that it was not scalable. Simulation was the strategy then. I presume because of the advent of virtualization that it is now scalable. This type of certification will give confidence not only to the successful candidates but also to prospective employers who know that the certificate has real-life skills behind it.

In the recent bootcamp I taught, we had a difficult situation as a student had a real production problem to deal with back at HQ and he had to fix it remotely. This happened a few minutes before taking the pivotal first exam. Because of this he let me know he would not be able to take the exam at that time. Fortunately for him, we had problems of our own with the testing site software. It took our proctor 2 hours to solve the problem with the tech support folks. This is fairly rare but does happen from time to time. As it turns out, the student with the production problem was able to take the exam as planned and passed with flying colors.

In my mind, he had already proved he should be certified by fixing his production problem but somehow he was able to collect himself and pass the exam too. Well done.

I joked with him that he must have caused the problem with the testing site software just to buy some extra time. I also mentioned that he deserved 2 paychecks that week but we agreed that these days just one paycheck is something to be thankful for.

But, if you are between jobs you can do worse than upgrade your certifications.

Certkingdom.com
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