Microsoft Certificate

To help you succeed in today's competitive IT job market, whether looking for new opportunities or advancing in your current position, you need to build and demonstrate your technology expertise and skills. When evaluating new candidates or considering the competencies of existing staff, many employers recognize the value of a Microsoft Certification. These certifications are designed to provide the recognition you need to help you excel in your career and provide employers with validation of your IT skills.

The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) certifications provide the foundation for Microsoft Certification. These certifications are designed to validate your skills on the features and functionality of key technologies. You can show your depth of knowledge in one specific technology, earn multiple MCTS certifications to show breadth across different products, or build on the MCTS to earn a Microsoft Certified IT Professional (MCITP) credential.

Demonstrate your specialized technical expertise with a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) credential. By earning this credential, you can prove your ability to successfully implement, build on, troubleshoot, and debug a particular Microsoft technology, such as a Windows operating system, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Microsoft offers a wide range of certifications regarding their software technologies and anyone having thorough knowledge of a particular Microsoft technology will be greatly benefited by being validated by Microsoft corporation as being a skilled professional in that technology. There are dozens of certification options available and therefore, a thorough discussion of each is not possible here. Please refer to the Microsoft Certification site http://www.microsoft.com/certification for more information regarding the various certification programs made available by Microsoft Corporation. The main idea behind Microsoft Certifications has more to do with exams passed rather than the certifications themselves, since many exams are same for multiple certifications. For example, if you pass MCSE, you are automatically also an MCSA.

MCSE (Microsoft Certified System Engineer)
Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE) is the most popular Microsoft Certification. To get this certification, the candidate must pass 7-8 exams. MCSE is awarded to people working with Windows Server 2003. Currently MCSE is being updated to Windows Server 2008 as well. It has two tracks of specialization ? Security and Messaging. Security revolves around a specialization in computer and network security using Microsoft ISA Server, whereas, messaging revolves around email and messaging using Microsofts Exchange Server.
MCITP (Microsoft Certified System Engineer)
Microsoft Certified IT Professional is a certification by Microsoft awarded to people working with emerging Microsoft technologies, which have currently not been added to an existing certification. For example, when Windows Server 2008 was introduced, its certifications were not directly merged into MCSE; instead Windows Server 2008 aspirants had to go through MCITP.

MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developed)
Microsoft Certified Professional Developed is a certification program for professionals working with Microsoft?s .Net framework for developing applications. It has 5 exams in all one completing all 5 is called an MCPD ? Enterprise Application Developer. Apart from this, it has 3 specializations ? Remote Applications, Web Applications and Desktop Applications.
MCEA (Microsoft Certified Enterprise Architect)
MCEA (Microsoft Certified Enterprise Architect) is a high end certification by Microsoft. It proves that the person is a veteran of the IT industry and is fit to be called an Enterprise Architect. It involves many stages of exams and presentations and interviews and the eligibility criteria clearly states that prior to appearing for the certification process, the candidate must have already cleared a number of Microsoft Certifications and completed at least 10-12 years of work experience in the relevant job profile.

MCEA (Microsoft Certified Enterprise Architect)
Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) is a category of certifications similar to MCITP. It contains exams related to specific Microsoft Technologies that one may choose to specialize in. MCTS broadly covers almost all major Microsoft Technologies.

Having a Microsoft Certification can greatly benefit you in many ways:-

1) Microsoft has a web site dedicated to people certified by them called the MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) members? site. This site allows recruiters to find the right person among the people certified by Microsoft for their organizations, giving a MCP, a worldwide reach in terms of job opportunities.

2) MCPs get a transcript number and an ID card indicating that they are certified by Microsoft.

3) MCPs have the right to use the Microsoft logo (which they receive after passing the exam(s)) on their resumes.

4) MCPs are also given a lot of preference in case of Visa interviews, especially for the US.

These are some important points to remember about Microsoft certifications. For further details, visit the Microsoft certifications site mentioned above.