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Microsoft To Retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE Certifications (ghacks.net) 67

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft will retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications on June 30, 2020, according to a new post by Alex Payne, GM, Global Technical Learning at Microsoft Worldwide Learning, on the Microsoft Learning Blog. twocows shares a report: Microsoft shifted its focus to role-based training and certifications in September 2018 and has added 34 different certifications since then to its portfolio "across Azure, Modern Workplace, and Business Applications". Since Microsoft is now focusing on role-based training and certifications, it will retire all remaining Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications on June 30, 2020.
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Microsoft To Retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE Certifications More

Microsoft To Retire MCSA, MCSD and MCSE Certifications

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  • I guess proprietary certifications (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:06PM (#59788302) Homepage Journal

    are like proprietary software. You can rely upon them only as far as you can rely on vendors not to change business strategies.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      Most certifications don't tell much about what you really know. It's one thing to get certified in a programming language - that tells others that you have the basic understanding of the language and that's actually something that effectively is valid "forever", regardless of what the certifying organ says - unless you get some bad amnesia.

    • Only tech companies that change survive.

  • Too bad (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:06PM (#59788304)
    Those certificates made it easy to know who not to hire.

    • They are trained to code new software that is already widely available to be purchased.

      I never bothered with the certifications, but I did go over the material needed to take the test. The problem I have seen with them is that you are learning to use the Microsoft Tools to build software that no business wants a developer to build, because it is cheaper to buy it off the shelf.

      When they need a developer is when they want to do something different from all the rest, and this is normally breaking many of the

    • The people with those certifications will most certainly still put them on their resume.

      • The people with those certifications will most certainly still put them on their resume.

        And job postings will still ask for them for the next decade.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Damn right, I worked my ass off and destroyed my server lab four times to earn the MCSE NT4 cert. TCP/IP was one of the requirements, and I remember actually dreaming in binary.

    • Developers will follow your advice at their peril.

      Most recruiters (who want to make deals btw) advise their candidates to have certifications. Robert Half correlates it with a 3-7% pay raise.

      It's the people who lack confidence in themselves and look down on themselves for not doing it who tell others to stay away.

      The most recommended certifications are the Microsoft ones.

      I can confirm that for a couple years the guy who had the most certifications at our local firm had the highest pay.

  • No more MCSEs? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Damn... I always liked those certs as they set expectations for their holders so well.

    MCSE = Must Consult Someone Experienced.

  • Oh Noes! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:07PM (#59788316) Homepage Journal

    I'll never be MCSD certified!

    I managed to get through a 30 year career without ever being certified in anything. I consider that a good thing.

    • I'll never be MCSD certified!

      I managed to get through a 30 year career without ever being certified in anything. I consider that a good thing.

      Based on my own experience in the tech industry I would say that you are definitely certifiable at this point!

      • I'll never be MCSD certified!

        I managed to get through a 30 year career without ever being certified in anything. I consider that a good thing.

        Based on my own experience in the tech industry I would say that you are definitely certifiable at this point!

        That's what my wife thinks.

    • I managed to get through a 30 year career without ever being certified in anything. I consider that a good thing.

      Congratulations on managing to get through your career by arbitrarily limiting yourself to only a small subset of potential job opportunities. No I'm not being funny here. MCS# certifications are a minimum requirement in a large number of positions created by stupid HR people. And before you say "I wouldn't want to work at a place that does this" remember that what a place is like to work at and how stupidly incompetent their HR department is are not at all related.

      • I managed to get through a 30 year career without ever being certified in anything. I consider that a good thing.

        Congratulations on managing to get through your career by arbitrarily limiting yourself to only a small subset of potential job opportunities. No I'm not being funny here. MCS# certifications are a minimum requirement in a large number of positions created by stupid HR people. And before you say "I wouldn't want to work at a place that does this" remember that what a place is like to work at and how stupidly incompetent their HR department is are not at all related.

        It's not that. What I do doesn't ask for those things. I haven't nothing bad to say about people with those certifications. They have different jobs and they are free to do them well. There is no certification I'm aware of in cryptographic hardware design. There is clearance, which is a government thing and it's a two way street. Governments won't hire me (because I won't take clearances) but I won't hire people with clearance because I'm building stuff that has to be secure and I want to know who they are

    • hehe You have me beat by ten years. I did a 20-year career in system-admin, starting with Windows 3.11 and Novell in 1990 and finished up in 2010 with the company I worked for at the time and its XP to Win7 migration. I never bothered to get any kind of certification. None of the companies I worked for required them, nor would they pay for them if I'd gone for them, so I just cruised along without any of them.

    • I don't think these certifications existed 30+ years ago, did they? The barriers for entry into the workforce have gotten a lot higher, more arbitrary, and pointless since then. Not just in IT either.

      • I have no clue when they started. It's not like I was paying attention. In my first job I had parallel computer CPU modules to build. Fun times.
        I asked the internet and it said 1993. So it was 3 years after I escaped from college. I was in an F1 team at that point. Not much call for microsoft certs in real time embedded race car electronics.

  • ..it will retire all remaining Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE) certifications on June 30, 2020...

    The following statement refers to me and is pertinent here...

    I am getting old; it may be time to move on...(read retire.)

  • Dammit! (Score:3)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:16PM (#59788350)
    Now where am I going to find somebody proficient in Minesweeper and Solitaire?

  • They're moving to cloud-based certs instead (Score:5, Informative)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @01:25PM (#59788388)
    If you look at the linked article, they're retiring most of their certs for things like Windows Server, SQL Server, C#, etc., and all the new ones are for things like Azure, Teams, etc. At a glance, it really looks like they're getting rid of certs that would allow you to manage an environment without MS cloud services. I don't like that.

    • People [almost] always recommended the thing they're certified in. It creates artificial salary inflation.

      The tricky one wil be Microsoft's certificate in Azure Cloud Security because it'll expire every ninety days.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

        The tricky one wil be Microsoft's certificate in Azure Cloud Security because it'll expire every ninety days.

        So MS outsourced issuing the certificates to Lets Encrypt?

    • If you look at the linked article, they're retiring most of their certs for things like Windows Server, SQL Server, C#, etc., and all the new ones are for things like Azure, Teams, etc. At a glance, it really looks like they're getting rid of certs that would allow you to manage an environment without MS cloud services. I don't like that.

      I'm unsurprised. Nadella seems to want to follow in some combination of Adobe and their sweet, sweet recurring revenue, and Google and their sweet, sweet, ad revenue. Sure, it's what the shareholders want, I get it..

      The problem is that I don't think MS is going to transition as well as Adobe has. I think MS may have issues long-term because on-prem is really where MS has any level of leverage. If Active Directory is now going to be 'in the cloud', why not use Google or straight LDAP? SQL Server has licensin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Dracos ( 107777 )

        Microsoft has to copy everyone because they're rather bad at innovating. For the past decade, tech business development has been obsessed with user counts as the primary success metric. This explains all MS purchases during this period, from Mojang to LinkedIn to GitHub, as well as their recent focus on the cloud and nefarious strategies for moving Windows users to cloud-based accounts. They're trying to conjure a userbase that they can access as a dataset, which Google, Apple, and Amazon have been amass

      • Nice spiel, but their revenue growth and stock price over the last decade disagrees with you. Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/st... [macrotrends.net]

        Microsoft's market cap is 800%+ that of Adobe's. 1.31 trillion vs 166 billion.

    • Yep. Myself and a coworker just did the programming in C# test a few months back so our small company would qualify for the Silver partnership. Now next year when our contract comes up no idea what we'll need to remain a partner. Sigh. We build on prem software. Might be forced to learn azure crap for no reason other then to tick a box and keep getting the cheap VS and other goodies.

    • I hated it when they went from MCSE/MCSA to MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) about 10 years ago. This is going to make things even more confusing.

  • It's all Azure from here on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Monday March 02, 2020 @02:02PM (#59788544)

    I've been in the Windows client and server space forever (started my career on NT 3.51, self-studied for the NT 4 MCSE a million years ago.) What they're doing is taking their server product certifications, throwing them out, and replacing them with "how to drive the Azure portal" certifications. (OK, OK, you can use the CLI and the REST APIs too...) It makes sense for them...train the newbies on Azure and they'll never know anything else or look under the hood.

    The thing I think they're missing is the fact that a lot of new entrants start (or started) their career learning the material for these tests, but that material covered fundamentals as well. Love it or hate it, Windows Server is a very feature-packed OS with network services integrated in such a way that you don't have to cobble them together from pieces. So, a newbie would have to learn a little about DNS, how DHCP works, what a directory service is, basic IP communications, web services, etc. for their tests. That's missing in Azure...newbies learn how to fling JSON requests at REST endpoints and nothing about infrastructure is covered beyond the high level details. We already have a huge problem with "web developers" who are given a couple of IaC tools and are now suddenly full stack geniuses who can do everything. Problem is, once that toolchain's limitations are reached, or a problem occurs, they're lost.

    I think people fiurther along in their IT careers aren't looking back and seeing that those starting out don't have a resource to learn this stuff. Maybe that's the idea with these cloud providers though...convince everyone that doing things on your own is too hard and you'd be much better off just paying them every month. I know not everyone agrees with me, but fundamentals of computing matter...it's not all just serverless functions on someone else's computer.

    • I've been in the Windows client and server space forever (started my career on NT 3.51, self-studied for the NT 4 MCSE a million years ago.) What they're doing is taking their server product certifications, throwing them out, and replacing them with "how to drive the Azure portal" certifications. (OK, OK, you can use the CLI and the REST APIs too...) It makes sense for them...train the newbies on Azure and they'll never know anything else or look under the hood.

      Same background as the poster above, started at DOS 2.1, Win 3.0, NT 3.51, etc.

      The original MCSE books and tests from that era taught you the fundementals of network computing, TCP/IP, file sharing, multi-user systems, back-office product integration like SQL and Exchange, a bit about security, storage and redundancy, clustering and network load balancing, pretty much everything you needed to know in broad and mid-detail strokes to know what's available and what can be done.

      This was a lot more approachable

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by MrKaos ( 858439 )

        The original MCSE ... was a lot more approachable for someone in their teens and 20's to pick-up and learn about functional and usable network operating system design and administration than trying to figure out an alternative such as Linux or Unix at that time which back then was a bit hard to piece together from one distro into a single system without learning the millions of config text files in various formats and layouts.

        That wasn't my experience. My DOS/Windows experience is similar to your however I picked the *IX, shell and, C path precisely because the Microsoft stuff was so expensive and inaccessible when I was keen to learn it. I'd ask my MS certified colleagues about the cost to certify and thought it was a hefty chunk of time and money that didn't necessarily guarantee a return even if it did provide an income. IIUC MS shops they would need to pick up people with those certifications to remain in some vendor prog

    • As "Web Programming" made people dumber with regards to system architecture and computer science in general, now they're trying to force 5G and IoT down people throats by offloading everything. I hope it blows up in their face somehow, but knowing how the Alphabet agencies are behind it I'm sure it won't.
    • "We love our infrastructure! It has been driving our business success!"
      Said no one ever
  • So, 34 new yearly points of income because they change the menu layout or settings locations and require the point-and-click "administrators" to go to school to relearn how to administrate they systems they're in charge of.
  • I saw my company sponsor a few people to sit these and I always wondered why. It didn't make them any more competent, it cost a fortune and it was more likely to pad their resume than benefit the company. Certifications like this (and their ilk by Oracle etc.) are just a money making racket - pay us a fortune for some lousy certification that nobody is interested in and will expire again in a few years.
  • Its stuff like this which is why I wish I never got started in this industry and the reason I want out.
    Except I am not skilled in any other area so I have no job prospects that pay similarly
  • I used to have an MCSE in NT4. If the job offers I got were any indication, it wasn't worth even a tiny fraction of what the thing cost to get.

  • Are these acronyms correct? I have many MS certifications on my wall and none are these: Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE): Mine state clearly: Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator (MCSA), Microsoft Certified Systems Developer (MCSD) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE). The issue I have with this is it took years to get HR to allow these certifications in place of College Degrees so

  • Who's being trained inside Microsoft to support all this loss of knowledge....still need to support the support. But it might help reduce the complexity of environments as u go from one job to another....no dumbass setting up domain. Controllers incorrectly etc
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