Hi again everyone, it's Simon here with another update.  

First of all, I mentioned last time that Dan was scheduled for his exam on Monday of this week, I give to you an excerpt from his response when I mailed him to see how he got on...

In Summary: Not bitter, honest.

Failed, needed 6 more.

Many of the questions were so ambiguous that I would have been no better off with the book and an internet connection. I found myself talking to the screen asking it to elaborate!

It would appear that I do not use 2/3 of the contents in my daily job, and never likely to.

That said, the initial questionnaire spoke volumes in that I did not consider myself very skilled in many of the areas, mostly because there is no call for it. As I am not likely to look for work elsewhere to widen my skillset I will try to work through some of the samples and read the book before the retake!

May need an R-Rated rant/batter my punch bag to fully recover from the most pointless set of questions ever asked….
 

As you can see, not a happy bunny.  On the plus side, Dan was determined not to take the setback lying down and scheduled a retake for the Wednesday.  The result this time summed up below

Battered it and got 900  loads of *** questions this time and I got loads of same questions that I looked into after failing.
 

So a big shout out to Dan for his success and good luck for the second half of the MCTS, 70-536, which he will be taking in the upcoming weeks either before or possibly even at Teched NA.

It would appear that my last update rang true with a few of you out there as I have had similar stories of failure from some of my followers.  I give you another snippet of correspondence

Exams seem to have got harder. I failed my first ever earlier this year, though didn’t do much prep. Two of our guys failed one they were both confident of  (one of them lives in the technologies on a daily basis) on first attempt. They have both passed on second try.

And finally, another of my followers had this to say on facebook following his struggles

B**ger it, I got 680 marks in the 70-640 exam (Active Directory, Configuring). Sadly you need 700 marks - I was 1 question out :-( Oh well I get a free resit on Sunday once I have brushed up my knowledge. This is proper tough, only 2 people out of 12 in the class actually passed the exam. Arghhhhh

The MCITP:EA doesn't come for little effort at the end of the day.

What's worse is that I studied the material for the 70-640 for 2 months before coming to bootcamp, and I still failed it.

 Nope, it is proper difficult. One guy manages massive networks for the BBC and he only got 640 out of 1,000. It's so hard, and i'm sooooo tired..

The trainer said they keep making it more difficult to minimise the amount of people that get the qualification.

It was the last comment that intrigued me most, is this the aim of the game?  Are the real world users being pushed out by the desire to reduce the number of certified bodies out there?

I suppose the real question that we should ask ourselves is "What is the certification showing?" For me, when taking my first lot of exams, it was having something tangible that showed i could use the tools of my trade proficiently. Now, having experienced the "latest" exam, i am not so sure this is the case as the direction the exam seems to be heading ironically favors the parrot / brain dumper rather than the real world user.

I would love to see some feedback on this topic.

That’s all for now, be sure to keep following all the #CareerFactor participants and check back to the site regularly for updates.

Thanks for reading,

/SiD