Microsoft is retiring its MCSA, MCSD and MCSE certifications

As an IT college teacher for 21 years, I can tell you that educational institutions are very angry about this change. We often have courses that map to Microsoft certificaion. Students write them, and employers want them. They are a general benchmark that allows organizations to narrow the list of candidates they interview for a job related to one or more technologies. Most college grads get jobs in small-to-medium organizations where Azure is not a common requirement. Moreover, many small organizations that moved their stuff to Azure at the request of an MSP are current moving it back on premises to save cost now that they realize it's much cheaper to do so. Together with Microsoft's abrupt replacement of the Win10 certifications last year (they gave no notice to colleges or publishers), it looks like the trust colleges have placed in the Microsoft certification program is disappearing fast.

Looks like they&#x27;re basically throwing on-prem stuff under a bus now: All the certs are for Azure-related stuff.[0]<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com&#x2F;cms&#x2F;api&#x2F;am&#x2F;binary&#x2F;RE4q70G" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com&#x2F;cms&#x2F;api&#x2F;am&#x2F;binary&#x2F;RE...</a>

I got my MCSE exactly 20 years ago; it had a different meaning at that time, S was for System, not Solution. Today the company I work for has close to 100,000 computers in Active Directory and no plan to change that: most of these computers are personal laptops and desktops, there is no move to cloud for these. I have no idea what training and certification the new hires working in the AD and Personal Computing teams will have to pursue, I will have to check but it is definitely not a change in favor of simplicity.

Bold move by Microsoft. I get that the cloud is more lucrative, but I feel like this is a bit premature. Plenty of businesses aren&#x27;t ready to switch to the cloud and it seems like MS and others want to push this illusion of &quot;everybody is doing it and you should too&quot;.

Good. I spent about 15 years hiring and managing MS devs and these certs were always a red flag to me. It almost guaranteed the person would only know the MS exam way and would have no critical thinking capabilities. They also rarely knew anything beyond the MS world.<p>They were a very strong indicator of someone’s ability to pass an exam, not that they were a good engineer.<p>From talking to other disciplines, the networking and infra certs were useful but everything I saw about dev certs was negative.<p>I guess they were useful in helping thin down a pile of CVs as these went straight to the bottom.

I&#x27;ve been out of the Microsoft loop for a while (thankfully). Their new certs are confusing, it&#x27;s not really clear what the person that does the &quot;Active Directory&quot; stuff even needs at this point.<p>MCSA was pretty straight forward, not really much marketing fluff. &quot;System Admin&quot; right in the name of the cert. Matched industry job titles and responsibilities.<p>&quot;Microsoft 365 Certified: Teams Administrator Associate&quot;<p>Does that have to do with Microsoft Teams? The description talks about &quot;Office 365.&quot; Microsoft has lost their minds with this 365 nonsense. &quot;Administrator Associate&quot; also sounds inferior to &quot;Administrator&quot;. Is this an entry level certification? It used to be somewhat simple hierarchy: Administrator, Engineer, Architect in the IT world. Now it&#x27;s buzzword soup everywhere.

Source, with a list of the more than 40 exams that will be retired: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;learning&#x2F;community-blog-post.aspx?BlogId=8&amp;Id=375282" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;learning&#x2F;community-blog-post...</a>

I feel like it&#x27;s not only certs that are retiring, most MS dev&#x2F;sysadmin I know (myself included as MCSA) have moved to linux stacks in the past 3 years

People should make their Opinions heard,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trainingsupport.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;mcp&#x2F;forum&#x2F;all&#x2F;petition-to-delay-the-mcsa-deadline&#x2F;4e080e20-a7b4-4cf0-a557-329d800f84a6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;trainingsupport.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;mcp&#x2F;forum&#x2F;all&#x2F;pe...</a><p>Probably will not do anything but...

Microsoft is a pale shade of its former self. Many argue that Ballmer departure was a good thing™. But I am sure it was the tipping point for a progressing irrelevancy. The situation is unlikely to change any time soon. Microsoft is bloodless and dying.<p>Azure brings them cool money now, but that&#x27;s a temporary thing. Fast forward some years and they will degenerate into a hosting company.<p>Why? Because software is the king. The cost of software distribution is negligible, and hardware is commodity.<p>How? Imagine Kubernetes + Digital Ocean combo. Are they a big threat to Azure? Not at all. Digital Ocean is sweet and beloved, but Kubernetes is hard and clunky.<p>Now imagine a piece of software that eliminates all deficiencies. Let&#x27;s call it The Killer. Now we have The Killer + Digital Ocean combo vs Azure. And not only Digital Ocean participates, take any other VPS or cloud-rental company. Take any other computer in the world.<p>Azure the Goliath will be defeated by millions of Davids in a blink of an eye.<p>Microsoft the company is going to face a harsh reality. And given the direction it follows today, it will have negligible chances of survival by then.

What are the options to have windows domain controller? We got some 20-30 windows7 and 10 pcs and need to centrally manage them - with profile roaming, with SMB ACL, and Administrative policies.<p>With this strong push towards Azure, there is still no replacement for AD, neither samba reached the point of being a primary controller replacement. Are active directory domain services supposed to be an alternative? It seems to me they only provide ldaps and able to login on windows, but no trusts and nothing to enable sharing ACLs.<p>So for a new deployment, with ample time to learn the options, I still have to setup some redundant windows servers, with AD and trusts, the old way.

MCSE was good, back in the days, prior to the proliferation of Internet and virtualization technologies. It taught fundamental networking and bare server under the hood. Not sure what new learners learn these days amid all the virtual abstractions, etc.

LOL. Finally! I had that MCSE thing for Windows NT4&#x2F;Networking and IIS. What an utter waste of time. I had to <i>actively ignore</i> most of what i knew already to pass the braindead questionairies. It wasn&#x27;t all BS, especially in networking, but mostly...?<p>Anyways, it smelled scammy, it empowered scammy tutors to scam scammy institutions to scam scammy people to scam employers into employing them. A whole market of scammers.<p>That is why i cut the card in two and BURNED it in public at the end :-)<p>(Don&#x27;t panic, there was an ashtray...)

I do wish there was a ‘skip tech interviews’ cert that was taken seriously.

Will this affect my ability to receive useless answers on their community run support forum?