My blog about Active Directory and everything else

Last weekend I attended a day long event sponsored by the philly.NET users group

There were a lot of sessions for coders and developers. Laura Hunter put together a really great lineup of speakers (Eric Fleischman, Brandon Shell, Mark Arnold, & Gil Kirkpatrick) for the Active Directory/IT Pro crowd.

After one of the sessions my friend Eric and I were talking to one of the instructors and a guy in class who had just come back from the AD Masters Course/Cert Program

What he told us is that only 10 out of 21 people in his class passed. In the previous track only 1 out of 21 passed. The instructor/MVP also backed the point of the exams being tough. I don't know if those numbers are dead on but even if they are a little off I got the point...not an easy cert to get.

What I think is happening is that the AD Masters course covers so much ground and there are not that many positions that allow someone to work with all the technologies needed to pass the exam. For example in my case ADRMS and ADFS would be big challenges.

I think what needs to happen is a mind set change for those going to take this course and exam. The windows/AD guys/gals have to treat this like Cisco folks treat the CCIE. That means setup a very good lab and just test test test and try to know the stuff cold before you go to the course. So in my case I'd really dig into ADFS and ADRMS and do a lot of brushing up on everything else.

I think it is good that they are making it this challenging. Other Microsoft certs have gotten a bad reputation over the years so it looks like this the masters cert is not going to have the same stigma. Also if in 5 years the Masters takes hold like the CCIE has then that will be very beneficial ($$$) for those that hold this cert/title.

I'm not sure if I'll ever go(it is not cheap) but now I know that I have a lot of work to do if I ever decide to go