No More MCSE?

A couple of years ago I got to go to a conference for Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) in Redmond, Washington (or the ‘Mothership’ as I prefer to call it) where one of the VP’s from Microsoft announced that the MCSE credential was being retired and to quote from Star Wars, as us geeks are prone to do, “it was if millions of voices cried out and were suddenly silenced”. Okay, I used a little poetic license on that… it was more like 300 voices, but you get the idea.

Now what really happened was that the name got changed. If you look at the Microsoft Learning website you will see that the MCSE and MCSA credentials are still alive and well and living under the assumed names of MCITP – Server Administrator and MCITP – Enterprise Administrator (I think that it must be some kind of witness protection thing, but nobody is really talking about it).

Now I know, “the MCSE had brand recognition” and “everybody knew the MCSE”, but regardless of what you call it, the new credentials have pretty much the same makeup that the old credentials had. Both the MCSE and the MCITP – Enterprise administrator have a workstation component, an infrastructure component, and an active directory configuration component. The MCITP also has an application configuration component, but that just covers some of the extra pieces that come with server 2008 like IIS 7.0 and SharePoint.

As you can see the two credentials stack up fairly well against each other except for one thing…and this item was even being ‘de-emphasized’ in the MCSE for 2003. What I am referring to is the Active Directory design class that was a part of the MCSE for 2000 that was incorporated into a couple of classes for Windows 2003 and is seemingly being ignored in Server 2008.

Why am I waxing so nostalgically for this class? For starters if was fun to teach…for three days I got to stand in front of the class and be the devil’s advocate by bring a harsh dose of reality into the Active Directory designs of my students. Now you may thing that I am just a heartless so-in-so to teach like that, but I remember that style of class enlightening more students on the inner workings of AD, DNS and life in general than any class that I have taught before or since. I admit I still use a lot of that material in my current classes.

Other than the design portion mentioned above (which to be fair is available as a suggested additional class by Microsoft), I think that you will become used to the new name for the MCSE and the MCSA credentials and if we wait long enough…they will change again anyway.