Why Doesn’t Microsoft Have Entry Level Developer Certifications?

 

 

I struggle some days for topics to blog about, that’s how exciting my life is.  :-)  Usually Trika comes to the rescue as she did again here.  She forwarded a question on to me the other day where somebody asked the question that is the title of this posting.   I thought it was a great question, I answered his email, but then Trika mentioned it would make a good post to my blog so, here it is.

The reason we don’t have an entry level cert for developers, ie one that certifies a person with less than 1 or 2 years of experience, is that it creates a difficult scenario to certify.  Let me explain why.

In order to certify a person for entry level, it would require certification on core programming concepts such as data structures, decisions, looping, OOP etc.  These topics are valid across multiple development languages and are not tied to VB, C#, C++, Java or most other development languages.

As a result, they are core knowledge that a person needs before they consider what to develop on for platforms and in what languages.   As a result, this becomes more of an industry certification that is vendor neutral.  That is something that Microsoft does not currently certify people on.  We leave these types of certifications to independent organizations such as CompTIA and IEEE.  They provide a better environment for testing on these concepts and it removes any interpretations around Microsoft certifying people on the “Microsoft way of doing things”.

Microsoft certifications are designed to show knowledge and skills with Microsoft products and technologies.  You apply the core concepts learned in entry level programming across these technologies such ASP.NET or Windows Forms.  As a result of this, there is a requirement that a person meets a minimum level of knowledge prior to taking these certifications.  

 

Gerry