Microsoft retires exams to help maintain the value of your certification.
Exam Retirement: When, Why, and How
Microsoft retires exams to help maintain the value of your certification.
- By Eckhart Böhme
- October 01, 1999
The ever-increasing rate of technological change means
that the “half life” of IT knowledge gets continually
shorter. For that reason, the Microsoft Certified Professional
program occasionally retires, replaces, or updates its
certification exams to reflect these changing realities
of the marketplace and to retain the value of the MCP
credential. At the same time, our goal is to balance the
need to stay current with the need to keep our upgrade
requirements and dates reasonable.
Current credentials are important because they enable
MCPs to use the MCP logo and to represent themselves as
Microsoft-certified. Current certification provides access
to the secured MCP Web site with seminars online, technical
product documents, occasional discounts, links to MSDN
and TechNet resources, and more.
The retirement of Microsoft exams is part of what gives
the MCP credential its value with your employers, clients,
colleagues, and others. And there’s nothing mysterious
about the changes. The primary criterion we use to make
exam-retirement decisions is the relevance of the skills
measured by our exams. To evaluate that relevance on an
exam-by-exam basis, we look at three factors: Is the technology
deployed in the marketplace? Does the volume of exams
taken indicate that the exam is meeting a market need?
Do sales of the corresponding Microsoft products indicate
continued market interest in certified professionals for
those products? Only when exams fail to meet these relevance
criteria do we retire them.
As a part of this concern with relevance, we retire exams
for a specific product version when we introduce a new
exam for a new version of that product. But we generally
keep the second-most current exam valid as well. For example,
the Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 4.0 exams have both
remained valid for the MCSE while Windows NT 4.0 has been
the most current Windows version. When Windows 2000 and
the corresponding exams are introduced, we’ll retire the
Windows NT 3.51 exams—but the Windows NT 4.0 exam will
remain current for some time.
Sometimes when we retire exams there’s no replacement,
so you don’t need to do anything to keep your credential
current. Sometimes, however, you’ll need to take a replacement
exam, generally within six months to a year.
To facilitate your exam and certification planning, we
make decisions about which exams get retired once each
quarter. All changes are announced in the monthly MCP
NewsFlash sent to MCPs and MCP candidates by email (To
subscribe, go to: http://register.microsoft.com/regwiz/forms/pic.asp).
The changes—including what actions you need to take and
when—are always available to you on the MCP Web site at
www.microsoft.com/trainingandservices/default.asp?PageID=mcp&PageCall=examsretired&SubSite=examinfo.
[MCP Magazine also posts information on retiring
exams at www.mcpmag.com.—Ed.]
Check it out periodically and always feel free to send
us your comments on the exam retirement process at [email protected]
Keeping your MCP credential valuable: That’s what exam
retirement and replacement is all about.
About the Author
Eckhart Böhme is Marketing Manager of the Certification and Skills Assessment Group at Microsoft.