When I am revising hard to pass my various exams I often get asked by friends and family “so what exactly does this qualification mean?”
The implied question is “how special is this?” or “how many millions of others already have one of these?” to which I never had an answer because Microsoft never provided one.
Now I can answer these questions as Microsoft have posted a page listing all the major technical qualifications such as MCP, MCSA, MCSE, MCSD and MCDST along with the number of people who hold each one. Obviously some people get counted several times for their MCP, MCSA and MCSE (for example), but it is still a useful indication of how you compare to others. They have said this page will be updated monthly, and should soon include all the new Vista and Exchange 2007 MCITP stuff.
As things stand at the moment this means that when I pass my 70-291 (hopefully very soon) I will be one of about 42,000 people in the world with an MCSA:Messaging (2003).
I’m not sure how special that makes me feel, but it is certainly a step up from being one-in-two-million vanilla MCPs.
August 27, 2007 at 14:59
The page has now been updated with information up to August 9th (but I guess it took them a short while to compile it all).
September 21, 2007 at 09:14
This has been updated again on September 18th.
Nearly 46,000 people with MCSA:Messaging now. I need to join this club before it gets too many, otherwise I won’t feel very “special”.
October 8, 2007 at 10:09
[...] I spotted an interesting link on Adam Veros blog.(whilst cruising Excel calc bug [...]
June 19, 2008 at 17:10
Now you know how many people have the same qualifications, you might also want to find out more about how MS protects their exams against cheating and aim to prevent people becoming “paper MCSEs” with no real skills.
August 5, 2008 at 12:03
[...]Microsoft have listened to the community and brought back their Second Shot offer much earlier than most people expected. Re-opening this in August 2008 and leaving it open right through to June 2009 seems to indicate that this will effectively become a permanent fixture[...]