In setting up my new home office I came across a long forgotten memento from my early days working with Citrix WinFrame. While it was the first vendor certification I had ever achieved, I can’t say that I felt particularly pleased with myself. It was one of those deals where in order to be a reseller you had to have so many Citrix Certified Administrators on staff, and Citrix did their level best to ensure that you passed the exam and walked away a proud new CCA. That was 13 years ago, and it’s rather disappointing to have to say that things haven’t improved all that much over the years. While the exams are much better than they used to be, it’s still often suspiciously easy to obtain a passing grade, especially when a new product is launched and this clearly does nothing to enhance the credibility of the exam and certification process. It’s not clear to me why vendors feel it to their advantage to adopt this approach. I find it very hard to believe that potential customers are fooled by the sudden appearance of large numbers of newly certified experts in any new product. Either way, the interface between education and marketing does not sit well with me when I see this happening, and I wish that vendors would be a little more respectful of their customers and cease this cynical approach. It’s not all bad news though, once you start to climb the certification ladder it is clear that education wins out and getting an advanced cert is by no means a walk in the park.
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