Ask the Experts: Microsoft Certifications | ATELRN001

[Music] hello everyone and welcome to our ask the expert session on microsoft certification my name is allison cracker and i'm your moderator today um for those of you wondering i am a white female i have brown curly hair and i'm wearing kind of a burgundy top i am joined by two different experts here that we will introduce in just a moment but i wanted to go through a few housekeeping items first just to kind of give you an understanding of how this session is going to go we have the chat feature available for you to ask questions you can post those anonymously or you can use your name it is up to you we ask that you um go through the questions and actually upvote the ones that you would like us to ask um to our moderators live and our experts live um go ahead and upload those with a thumbs up and our team uh is going to be helping to kind of um curate all those questions and feed them over that we're going to be asking on camera some will ask verbally and then others we have an entire team that's going to be answering your questions over chat we get a lot of questions in sessions like this so we're going to do our best to answer as many as possible if we have a ton of questions um we will definitely try to get to them as many as possible but be patient with us and bear with us as we get through all these questions as a reminder please adhere to the microsoft code of conduct we'll make sure that it's posted in the chat for you we've got it here as well um and we just make sure that we are uh creating an inclusive event so with that um i want to introduce our two experts that we have with us here today we've got liberty munson she is our director of psychometrics at microsoft uh and then we have sudarshan krishnamurthy who is also our director of microsoft certifications at microsoft uh they are both great experts and we're super excited to have them so uh with that we are going to kick it off with sudarshan the first questions darshan is going to go uh to you and you know we've recently had this switch um of kind of this this switch and shift to roll base certification so sudarshan could you kind of walk through why we made this switch um and the shift to role-based certifications and the impact on our program absolutely it's great to be here everyone and alison it's a great question to begin a conversation here the role of the idea professional is constantly evolving uh what used to be a skill in the past where i t professionals were responsible for point products they were looking at specific products and you know the skill sets around those specific products for example if you're a security engineer you would be looking at uh you know the skill sets that are required for endpoint protection or firewalls so those were very point products skills that were required in the past but what has happened now is more of the solution focus where the it professional needs to look at it not just uh from a product perspective but an end-to-end solution that they do they need to manage in a in a very complex environment so because of that we have moved over we have kind of made the shift the role-based certifications where we are looking at skills that are needed for solution managing solutions across the idea infrastructure and then all the skills associated with that uh so that's sort of the requirement in the market and we are constantly evaluating looking at our roadway certifications and looking at all the new job roles that are emerging right so as the job roles emerge we create a certification around it if there's enough demand and if there is a market need for it and so shifting over to role-based certifications is really helping the petty professional to become more complete in terms of managing their solutions end-to-end rather than being focused on a specific point product great that's that's exciting it's been fun to be a part of this program as we've made that shift um my next question comes to liberty and liberty could you walk through um you know build is a developer conference after all and we are talking about certification so um we get this question a lot um and we've already seen it in the chat why should developers care about microsoft microsoft certifications and kind of what's in it for them so this i love this question because my because my husband is a developer and he asked me this all the time so we have these wonderful debates about the value of certification for developers and i would say for um the really where certification matters is when you're starting out in a career because it is the thing that sets you apart fewer people have certifications than you may realize so if you're looking for that what makes you different when you go to apply for a job and you send in your resume having a certification is certainly one of those things that makes you different in terms of your ongoing career the value of certification is that it really demonstrates um uh interest in continuous learning and i think we all agree that more and more organizations are putting a high emphasis on this need and willingness and interest in pursuing additional learning opportunities so how do you stay up to date on technology that's constantly changing certification is a great way to show to your manager that you do care about the future of this of these technologies and you're well prepared to use them on an ongoing basis perfect uh it's it's a great question i know we get that we get that question a lot um sudarshan i have the next questions for you it's kind of similar but um could you talk about you know are we reintroducing a c-sharp certification or web development certification and and if not can you talk through kind of um how we make that decision and and why yeah like i said earlier as part of our role-based uh certification evolution we are constantly evaluating all of the really in-demand job roles and making sure that we are addressing those job roles so it's an ongoing process it's not a once and done right we are constantly evaluating um not only the on-demand job roles but also the tasks and the skills that are associated with those job roles and we do this through a process called job task analysis jta as many of you might be familiar so it's it's that uh you know discipline that we have around first evaluating the in demand job roles and then the skills associated with the job roles that we are constantly doing so with that process and with that background we will be looking at what are the skills that are needed for developers and if there is a c-sharp related skill set that's relevant to a specific job role then that's when we would go back and look at uh you know the specific certification that's already market or if you need to create a new certification that needs to be part of our portfolio we would do that and then c would be incorporated into that specific certification at this point in time i don't have a specific answer for you and this is the certification that's going to have c sharp but i want to assure you that microsoft is constantly evaluating all of these job roles and also the skills associated with the job roles so we make the right decisions for our customers and you know if there is enough demand and if there is uh enough uh interest then it will automatically surface up and then we'll address it as we go so that's kind of how we operate yeah i i do want to say that our azure developer does have c sharp code in it and when you take azure developer you actually get to choose between c sharp and python so we do have uh that certification that actually it doesn't test on c sharp per se but you have to know c sharp or python to be able to answer a good number of those questions on that exam and we are also in the early stages of doing something similar for ai engineer awesome um liberty i'm going to kick it back to you and ask kind of a follow-up question we're getting a lot of questions about um you know if someone's a net developer what should be an appropriate certification for them to either maybe try for their first time or maybe something that's a little bit more advanced do you have a recommendation for someone who's a net developer the because of the because we uh don't really have a true.net certification that's a hard question to answer i think that uh the closest thing that i could recommend from developer perspective would be our azure uh developer we have the we have some developer roles in the power platform might also be another place to do some exploring uh if you really are kind of just trying to figure out how to get your feet wet in our program i would look at the fundamentals ai fundamentals not strictly code either but i think gets you into uh would set you up for a more code-based role um if you were in if you were thinking about pursuing that um and maybe even data fundamentals might be another place to look so those would be some ones that i would check out and see if they at least can you know dip your toes in a little bit in the places that you'd like to see perfect thank you um i appreciate your honesty liberty uh so this next question is sudarshan um sudarshan once again uh you know we get this question a lot uh but what certification route do you recommend for folks who work with on-prem technology stacks and you know we've noticed that a lot of our certifications are more cloud-based so so what do you recommend yeah i mean uh we have seen our customers have a mix of like you know on-prem and cloud technologies and there's hybrid environments so we would recommend uh the azure stack operator certification for on-prem technologies that's a good one if you're focused on on-prem looking to transition to this hybrid cloud world or our even our windows modern desktop certification has a lot of on-prem content for on-prem windows so that's another certification that you should explore and even our the data database administrator certifications and some of the certifications that we are going to have in the future will have a lot of those uh on-prem technologies included as part of the hybrid cloud cloud workloads so you would think of the id professional being the hybrid cloud administrator where there's a little bit of on-prem workloads and a little bit of the cloud workloads and so in those environments you will see a lot of the on-prem content but for now it's the azure stack uh operator it's the modern desktop it's the database administrator and maybe in the future we'll include uh some of the technologies that i know all of you have been asking for sql server and um windows server 2019 right so windows server 2019 we don't have a certification we won't have a certification alone but it will be part of that hybrid uh administrator job role that i just described right so those are the ones that i would recommend alison perfect thank you uh liberty this next question is for you um and the the question is around you know microsoft is making lots of changes and it feels like it's it's kind of hard to keep up so can you walk through why we make so many changes and um you know kind of what what are the next steps that people can can do about it to stay up to date uh we are making so many changes because the technology's changing so fast and so we are learning kind of along with you all uh what we need to do to better support our those people who want to be certified so not only do we have to kind of keep a pace with what job roles are really kind of starting to emerge in industry that will help organizations be successful and help them on their digital transformation journeys so we have to come up with the right certifications that enable that and empower them and then on top of that we also need to make sure that our exams and our certifications stay up to date so we're constantly updating those as well which i know can be particularly challenging when you're studying for one of these exams so what we try to do is to give you as much advance notice as possible when something significant is going to change so the best thing you can do when you're preparing for one of our exams is go back to that exam details pages pretty regularly and take a look at when we're going to tell you the exam is going to be updated download the skills measured document and we'll tell you explicitly what's changing and when so don't just go there saying sign up for the exam and never go back because odds are by the if you take more than two months between when you sign up and when you plan to take the exam the exam is going to change so make sure you are diligent about checking that every so often so you know what's changing and when perfect and then a follow-up question to that for those people that are already certified um you know we just recently introduced certification renewals can you talk through certification renewal and then also kind of liberty how it's conducted on our end and how we actually develop the renewal piece of it so we uh we decided that we wanted to do something that was reduced friction for people to maintain their certifications the idea here with renewal is that we want you to be invested in continuing to learn and staying up to date on these technologies so how can we make it simple for you to do that so what you do is you take an assessment on learn if you feel like you need some learning prep to go with it we've also curated some modules based on the particular uh learning path and said here's the content that you need that we think is the most important content and how the certification has changed in the last six months or to one year and these are the things that we're going to assess you on so and you can take the assessment as many times as you want you'll have a six month window to renew your certification but once you renew it your certification will be extended for another year and we design these assessments very much like we design our exams we have subject matter experts working and reviewing the learn content which is a little different than our exams because we don't have that such a tight link between the exam questions and the learn content like we do with cert renewal but they review that content and then they write questions that are aligned with it but they're still difficult questions because it's still renewing your certification but we've just simplified the process by delivering it through the microsoft learn platform awesome it's a fun uh rollout that we've made it's been super fun to kind of work on this on this and i i'm excited for the opportunity that it means for everyone um to be able to renew their certifications and really a friction uh free way this uh next question is for student archan it's a little bit of a follow-up from a previous question that i asked you um but we have some folks who are are asking kind of you know they know that we're in the middle of a transition um on our on our certification program and have you know rolled out rule based um but it seems like there is some hope there are some holes and gaps in important skill sets and you we talked about on-prem um as an example what should our audience expect to be coming uh in the next year or so to fill some of those gaps and is there anything that you can tell us yeah i think uh we've made some very positive uh steps forward right including uh introducing some of the in-demand job roles like for security for example right we introduced the security fundamentals and the stock analyst job role uh for the sox certification and those are all very positive steps that we've taken to make sure that we are addressing the most in demand job roles for as far as the gaps go that that has been left from retiring all of the mcsa dna if that's what people are asking about then we've tried to do our best to kind of map what the new certification job role-based certification equivalent would be so i would ask encourage people to go check those out to make sure you know you you can see some kind of a path forward from the from the last exams or less certifications that you were interested in uh what you can expect going forward is for us to make more investments and and be focused on the the hybrid uh sort of uh job roles that i talked about earlier we are not going to be building certifications just for the on-prem technologies it will be a mix of on-prem and cloud so we'll continue to make more investments we'll continue to look for again do the market research find out which of those skill sets are in most demand and what employers are demanding what our customers are asking for and we'll continue to make more investments and you will see some really good certifications come out from microsoft um just like the security portfolio that i talked about and you know there's going to be more exciting certifications coming in that space as well as other solution areas that's what you can expect from microsoft if i can if i can jump in here because security is actually um a really great example microsoft i've been at microsoft for almost 15 years and for a very very long time we said we would never create a security certification we were never going to create such a portfolio but we listened to what our audience was saying we looked at the emerging job rules and we said you know what we need to do certification in that space so even though we don't have something that you might be interested in today i would say looked at the security certifications and just recognize microsoft does do this due diligence to make sure that we are meeting the market needs and where organizations really need certified individuals to be able to drive their business forward great addition liberty thank you um okay this next one actually i'm going to kick it back to you liberty so um we i love this question and i definitely i know we get it a lot i've asked it to before but um you know can you talk through and if you learned your skills through microsoft learn through self-paced you know free learning paths we have available is that enough to be able to pass the exam or do you need additional experience in addition to that for fundamentals that should be sufficient but it may not it should be close right because for fundamentals it's really knowledge based questions and so if you've done if you've done your studying if you really understand the content that's presented on learn you probably are in a relatively good place to be successful but for role-based exams the answer is no by design the we have intentionally said that you need to have experience to be able to pass these exams so these you're gonna get questions that are true problems that azure administrators or azure developers have to solve in their everyday jobs and so if you have that experience you just have you're one step closer to being understand what the problem is and how you need to solve it and so then you can answer the question correctly even more important we are starting to add uh labs to more and more of our exams and if you just don't have that hands-on experience you're you're really going to struggle in those labs because what the labs do is they connect you to through a virtual machine to azure as an example and that asks you to complete between 12 and 15 tasks in azure and you just have to have the experience to be able to do that otherwise you're never going to be able to get through those labs i like to say get get training get experience get certified that's my advice if you remember nothing else remember that get training get experience get certified i love it we should use that in our marketing materials liberty um sudarshan this next question is for you this came uh from one of our attendees a little while back i'm catching up here um but from a perspective of microsoft as an employer um you know what weight do we give to microsoft certification when we're making hiring decisions and then um maybe if you could also kind of dive into some of the requirements that we even have internally for certification in our employees yeah i mean eat your own dog food right so we do have uh a program internally we call it the technical skilling initiative where we are sort of mandating um or requiring a lot of our employees who are uh customer facing who are in technical roles to actually be certified uh in certain areas right so we would uh we have a good mapping of the the role that they are in the field to specific certifications that they need to attain within that fiscal year our fiscal year so that's the technical skills initiative program and we are driving certifications across our employee base to make sure you know microsoft employees are certified in these areas that they need to be certified in or they need to understand the skills in similarly you know when it comes to hiring decisions that's a tough one right because there are a lot of uh you know legacy certifications that are industry leading that that have been used uh by our own you know hiring managers and we are working with them to sort of you know make sure microsoft certifications also get included in the job descriptions and the job requirements uh i wouldn't say you know we are completely there yet where every single job role requires a microsoft certification and you know it doesn't require an industry certification there's value to industry certifications as well so it's it's sort of a nice balance a nice mix of industry certifications and microsoft certifications that we are starting to influence and make sure you know our own microsoft hiring managers have those certifications listed in the job descriptions but it's it's you know it's a it's a process uh it's a thing uh in in flight it's not like it's done it's a process that we are working through but um technical skills initiative is a is a big initiative and you know every year we are adding more and more folks into the tsi program as well as requiring them to renew their certifications liberty talked about certification renewal our employees would also require uh to be going through the continuous learning process that she talked about for renewals and getting their certifications renewed every year so that's also part of the requirement as part of tsi so we are driving not just new certifications but also renewals within our own employee base i love that and uh our team on the learning side has all gotten certified as well um so we have definitely all taken and sat for exams and uh it's it's a great experience for us to go through uh so this next question liberty is for you and i just just also want to say thank you for everyone asking questions um we are keeping up uh and trying to get them answered as quickly as possible so um liberty this one is for you we have some questions about how we go about creating exams this is what you live and breathe every day liberty um so it's kind of the process for creating exams and then could you also touch on uh you know the beta exam process too because i know there's a lot of questions about that as well sure so this is this is what i do it all starts with a job task analysis where we really try to understand what's involved to be successful in the job role once we have that we actually use that as the basis for the learning that we create and then the exam because it does cover kind of the universe of skills that people need to be successful in the job role we can't test on everything so we have to pick the most important things we want to test on and we do that through what we call an od session so once we have the objective domain od created that's the list of skills that we're going to include on the exam we blueprint that which means we ask subject matter experts to tell us how important and how often they complete each of those tasks and i use that to tell to decide how many questions we're going to write to each of those content areas so if something's really important or done a lot we're going to write more questions to it than something that's not done very often or isn't as important and then we have subject matter experts write the questions because item writing is such a difficult task they go the items then go through multiple levels of review so once an item is written it's reviewed by another set of subject matter experts so the person who wrote the item can't review their own item other subject matter experts look at it and then we put it into beta because no matter how perfect an item seems on surface there's inevitably some items that just don't work when we put them on an exam and we're all none of us know why it just is the nature of the beast so that's why we put it through the beta exam and that's where we have people come in and take the exam in in an exam like to take the questions in an exam like situation because we know that changes the dynamics of how the items work and you all leave a footprint when you take an exam that tells me a bunch of information about the quality of the questions is it too easy is it too hard does it differentiate between high and low performers and i also give you an opportunity to provide comments so i actually read every single beta comment and using that plus the psychometric data we make a decision about whether we're going to keep an item we're going to kill an item or if i'm going to have talk to subject matter experts to learn more about what's going on because it's unclear a lot of times the comments help me figure out what's wrong with an item and we can fix it sometimes the items help me figure out what's wrong with an item and we can't fix it and then those items are removed from the beta exam and so that's why you don't get scored right away because we don't want you to be scored on a question that we're not going to keep or that changes so we are make sure that you get scored on only those questions that we're going to have on the live exam so that's why it takes about 10 business days after the exam goes live or is publicly available before you'll see your score to participate in the beta exams there's a couple different ways follow the blog because i always post the beta codes um to the blog that beta code will give you 80 off of the exam and if you show up and take it you'll get 25 off your next exam uh and then you can also join our smee database which is um a way for us to you to indicate that you're interested in the beta exam for example and what your skills are and then if you match the skill set that we need for beta exam you will get a separate invitation to potentially participate all of these though are limited on first-come first-served basis so if you see these things and you want to participate sign up soon because some of these go very very quickly perfect thanks liberty um and we will make sure that um our moderators post uh where you can actually sign up for that sme database in the q a so you all can go ahead and do that and then an additional plug if you check out the microsoft learn blog we post every beta exam that's coming out you can subscribe to a beta exam label specifically so you get notified when those blogs are coming out so that you can uh keep ahead of and be the first to know uh when we're rolling out new beta exams and we make sure to post uh all new exams uh that are coming out in the beta process uh on our microsoft learn blog okay uh this next question thank you liberty that was a really long answer um very detailed thank you for that uh this next time [Laughter] this next question is going to be um for su darshan so upstairs we have a fair amount of our attendees who have certified in fundamentals and are trying to figure out what their next steps are so once we once someone has been certified in fundamentals what should they do next um and you know maybe are there some recommendations that you could make um in some you know areas that are really really popular right now yeah our most popular certification is obviously in the solution area of azure like absent infrastructure and data and ai um as well as uh you know the security certifications those are all like really in demand so if you are certified in fundamentals in any of those areas if you are certified in fundamentals for azure for example or data and ai you would go in and look at all of the role-based certifications that are relevant to your job role because azure fundamentals are sort of broad and then you can now zero in on specific job roles that you want to go specific uh specifically skilled in or validate your skills in and so those are the ones that we should you know recommend we would recommend uh for you for example if you are working in the infrastructure space and you're managing azure infrastructure then azure admin could be a really good start for you uh at the next level after you've completed your azure fundamental certifications similarly if you're in the data and ai space and you want to move up um again from the fundamental level to the associate level then to the expert level then there's there's a path uh that you would go explore depending on what job role that you're currently in or a job role that you want to push you right so you could be uh you know as a fundamental certified but you know you're maybe a student or somebody who's looking for a career switch so you would want to first understand what is the job role that you want to target and based on that you can pick a certification and before you go actually uh pick a certification and try to get certified you can also explore the learning content on microsoft learn right so as you as soon as you're done with your fundamental certifications or you have a fundamental certifications and you know a specific job role that you want to target you can go look at the learning content and there is also the skills measured uh page that has detailed information on what that job role entails what are all the skills that are covered whether it's managing operating or designing specific solutions that you're interested in so i would encourage you to look at all that information the rich amount of information that's available on the microsoft learn pages and then you make your decision on what specific role you want to target and then you would go take the learning path and complete the learning before you take your certification and you know to liberty's point you also want to get some experience and make sure it's not just the learning it's also the experience that matters so if you're able to get some experience then you would target the certification otherwise i think it's also fine to do your learning in more detail whether it's an instructor like training class or or whatever else that suits you and then go to the certification right so that's what i would recommend so first get clear on what job role you want to target and then pick the area um that would target that job role and then pursue that path wonderful thank you for that detailed answer we have so many questions uh that are coming in that we are actually going to stay on longer um than our allotted time so we're going to extend this this q a with our experts a little bit longer for about another 10 to 15 minutes so that we can continue to answer your questions um thank you for all the questions um that are coming in and we are doing our best um to answer them as much as possible so liberty this next question is for you this is a naming question um why did we choose to name the fundamentals exams 900 um and wouldn't it make more sense if they were a lower level why why did we why do we make that decision and can you explain that a little bit uh i saw that question and i thought it was a good one so um we had this was by design because people tend to read more into the numbers than what we ever intended so we thought you know what we're going to make them 900 and then people can if people say well the numbers mean the level of the exam we can say ah fundamentals are 900 that and so we actually did it by design because we're trying to indicate very clearly that the numbers are not related to the level of the exam so people look at courses and they like see 100 and they think it's entry level or lower level and that's certainly not the case in our certification program especially if you look at some of the stuff like modern desktop and enterprise admin which are both 100s but very clearly well above the entry level perfect i know i have gotten that question from people um that have asked me that as well so thank you for that explanation uh sudarshan this one is for you um on the topic of certification renewals we're getting a few clarifying questions um that folks have on certification renewals so how long should i start receiving renewal suggestions for my certification um you know this particular person did the az204 uh in march of last year and they're a little bit worried they wouldn't have enough time for the renewal process before the expiration so could you um maybe walk through um that timeline again a little bit more and then the other question is if someone's not receiving their information what should they do yeah great questions uh so basically in terms of your renewal um process the renewal eligibility what we call the eligibility window for renewal that opens six months prior to your certification expiring so if your certification is expiring in december then you should receive an email or a notification in your inbox uh six months prior to that which is in june right so you should receive an email in june saying you know you're eligible for renewal go and take your renewal assessment and you can take the renewal assessments any time during that six month window between june and december in that example that i just gave uh as long as you do it before december your certificate and pass the assessment your certification will be extended by by a year right now the reason why some of you might not be seeing renewal notifications yet is because your certifications are now valid for two years right they were valid for two years so until you hit that 18 month mark you're not going to get your renewal notification so that's the reason why some of you might not be receiving uh your renewal notifications yet but going forward as you know we've changed the policy starting june that your certifications are going to be valid for a year so at that point in time you will start receiving notifications six months prior so whether it's two year validity of your third or one-year variety of cert your eligibility is always six months prior to your certification expiring and if you don't get your emails or if you know you're not checking emails from microsoft on the certification new you can always go to your certification dashboard or your loan profile and it will show up there to say that your whether you're eligible for renewal or not and that would be six months prior to your certification expiring so i would encourage you to go check your certification dashboard log into your certification dashboard check out all the certifications you have look at the dates when the certification is expiring and then you should see a renew button pop next to it like a blue renew button that you'll see that will pop next to it if your certification is due for renewal and it's six months prior to uh certification expiry so that's when the eligibility opens perfect so even if someone didn't get the email notification um they still have the ability to to renew because it's in there it's in their dashboard that's that's great information thank you for that clarification liberty uh this next one's for you we have a lot of certifications um that retire sometimes so could you talk through um how we retire certifications and why and then what does it mean once something's retired um is it still valuable uh can you kind of walk through kind of what happens once a certification retires sure so the primary reason why we retire certification is because we don't see that there is a long lasting value in that certification anymore um or they're we're making some significant change in the job role that it just makes sense to create a new certification or it's just not psychometrically sound and we don't know what to do about it and so we just want to not be testing people on something that really doesn't have any value um in terms of validity and reliability so those are the kind of the three big reasons why we retire certification we always try to give you as much notice as possible six months being the minimum and then uh what what happens though is that your certification will stay on your transcript in the active certifications for two years after it retires or until it expires whichever comes first and then it moves to certification history because we recognize that while microsoft is trying to stay ahead of all of the things the changes that are happening in organizations to support their digital transformations there are some organizations that aren't moving that fast and for some organizations those certifications are still valuable so we keep those in that active section for two years because we figure that's about the amount of time after microsoft chooses to retire it where it will largely be less valuable across organizations so after it retires it's still valuable as long as the organization values that skill set perfect gotcha thank you and then um again that um that remains on someone's transcript so they're still able to say you know i i achieve the certification as long as it's still valuable in the marketplace yep that's great um sudarshan we have a question that's coming in about um you know all the content that's available on microsoft learn so how would you recommend someone kind of navigate uh what they can start to study what's the best way for them to do that and what are the resources that are available microsoft learned to do so yeah i mean if you're interested in a certification uh then there are filters available right when you go to microsoft learn you can go to the browse certifications page and you can go into the certification details to look at all the skills outlined and everything but if you're looking for learning content specific to certifications there's a filter that you can apply you can pick the solution area that you want you can you can say certification and you can also check fundamentals or role based and then it will filter the content for you based on whatever you checked right so that's a good way to i know there's a lot of content on learn so it's really difficult for you to figure out what is relevant to my certification that i want to pursue so that i would recommend using the filters and then selecting whatever uh certifications that you're targeting for learning and then those learning content and learning paths would show up that are relevant to whatever options you picked so that's the best way to do it on learn i hope that answers the question alison because i want to make sure yeah yeah i think so one thing i would add is that every certification page and exam page shows relevant learning path content um that's associated with the skills that are being measured in that exam or certification so that's a great way to start too um should mention that filter that's definitely one way um and we're working on improving you know the the searchability and filtering option but you can always go to the certification page that talks about that specific certification or assist and its associated exam and deep dive right into the um learning path that's that's associated with it yeah okay um liberty this next question is for you it's a um cert certification renewal question so uh when there is an expert level certification that has an underlying requirement um say another associate level certification how does cert renewal come into play do they have to both be renewed um do you treat each one individually what happens when you have a requirement um for certification renewal this is a good question and it's a work in progress so uh we haven't quite we haven't uh finalized the details of how this is going to be implemented but our vision is that when you renew uh that you would renew both of them so you have to renew the associate and the expert to keep the expert i the uh the challenge we have right now um is is some engineering work that needs to be done so we're working on making sure all of that gets in place but that is kind of the vision um at least to my knowledge but you know what i'm gonna actually turn it over to starting so he can correct me if i'm wrong yeah i mean it's definitely a work in progress and we need to learn from the market but but what we've announced when we made the announcement back in december is that the expert level certification if you have an associated and expert level and if you want to renew your expert level certification you just take the renewal for expert level and that will be your expert level but if you want to also keep your associate level with it then you have to take your associate level renewal as well so that's what we've communicated to the market and that's the current policy but to liberty's point we're still you know wanting to get market feedback if that's going to resonate with the market or not we might make changes in the future but the stated policy is uh the the level expert level is independent of associate level when it comes to the new one so got it okay so um just for my clarity so i'm understanding because i didn't know this um so if you have an expert level um you want to renew that expert level you're just renewing the expert level rather than you don't you aren't also required to renew the requirements of the associate level unless you want to do so correct exactly got it great thank you um and then um you know a follow-up question for you darshan um we're getting a couple questions on do we have any certifications that focus on multi-cloud integration so um do we have any kind of partnerships with other it companies and do joint certifications on anything yeah we do we don't have multi-cloud certifications but we do have um if you're looking at our specialty certifications and that's the category right where we have microsoft technology stack and on top of it we want to apply our partner technology stacks uh sap niger is a great example where we have um you know azure uh infrastructure with sap workloads and so we are kind of uh working in that domain with specialty certification so you'll see more of um speciality certifications that we might do in the future like linux on azure is one that we might do where you know there is um you know other partner technologies on microsoft technology stack so that's what we are looking to do in terms of specialty certifications and partnering with technology companies but we don't have any multi-cloud kind of technology certifications at this point that's not something we'll be looking into yeah great thank you um liberty a question for you on on preparation we've kind of talked about um you know microsoft learn in and of itself not being enough um to get uh certified so you have to you have to you know get trained and get experience and get certified um you know for people that are looking for those additional learning resources what else do we have available outside of the self-paced learning on microsoft learn so we have instructor-led training um and we're doing and i would say that the community is really a great option too so um if you know people who are azure administrators and you take the if you look at the skills measured list and you don't know how to do something go ask somebody or even uh join it i think it on our blog and things like that you can find access to people who are more than willing to share how they do things people like to talk about what they do but if you don't even if outside of that just take the skills measured list and practice um you get there's a number of opportunities in labs and things like that that microsoft gives you um some access to technologies like azure for a really low cost or even free for a pre uh period of time so take those that list and just go and practice the skills and get that experience if even if you can't do it on the job or if you're in a different job role if you have access to the technology and your work experience talk to your manager and ask them if you can have you know take some time and using azure and and practicing those skills so uh we also have all sorts of documentation on docs.microsoft.com is another great resource to figure out how to learn um information that's outside of the formal learning path as well perfect thank you and then um one more last we're going to have one more last question this one is for liberty do we have anything else that helps you prepare and practice for the exam uh most of our certifications have practice exams so once you've gone through you've done the learning path or you've done ilt and you've gotten some experience if you want to get a feel for what the questions are like on the exam do a practice test because um they are not the exact same questions but they're going to give you a really good feel about what to expect and i would say that's 50 percent of the experience in getting ready is just being prepared to what is this question going to look like how complicated are them what's a case study and taking a practice exam gives you that insight even though it's not the exact same set of questions just having that knowledge about the item types and how it all comes together in the exam is uh really really helpful fantastic and uh just for those of you that don't know we make sure to list if there is an associated practice test that is available it is on the exam page so you can scroll down to the bottom of the exam page and you can see if there's an associated uh practice test and we make sure as soon as those come available um they're not available for everything but we do make sure to post those with that um we are out of time even with our extensions so i just want to thank sudarshan and liberty for your time and answering all the questions and um for everyone that joined us today and answering all your questions thank you so much it was great to have a wonderful conversation with you all we have a few resources that we wanted to share with you um just to make sure that you know what's available we talked a lot about microsoft learn obviously we have a curated experience to help you navigate what to do next coming from microsoft build so uh aka dot ms slash learn at build uh we also have our certification overview page that gets you started on everything you need to know about certification and then we've got our community sites and the microsoft cloud skills challenge make sure to check that out again thank you so much it was a pleasure spending time with you today and enjoy the rest of build thank you

2021-06-02 02:44

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