An Industry Standard (Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE))

Member Name: JonRose

Product:	Microsoft Certified System Engineer (MCSE)
Date:	10/10/00 (341 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good qualification, gives you the edge

Disadvantages: hard work and expensive

This is a must for anybody who takes their career in Systems support/engineering seriously. I personally am a developer and I have just achieved this certification because of the the overlap of exams with the MCDBA and the usefullness of having this certification on my CV.

This is quite hard work to achieve and it is ideally done from within the framework of a role carrying out this sort of work on a day to day basis. If like myself you only touch on some of the apects of some of these subjects then you might find you need to do a lot more reading.

The differnet options you can take are all detailed quite well on the Microsoft website, www.microsoft.com/mcp so I will not detail those - but I will give you some good pointers to passing well.

First read the books - most of the approved study guides are quite good - some are better than others - read what others have said on Amazon and you will not go far wrong. But forget most of them for practice exams they are too dissimilar from the real thing. What you need to do in the way of practice exams is go to www.transcender.com and buy yourself some testing products.

The whole thing will set you back about £100 on books and then £500 on software and then about £400 in exam fees assuming you pass each one first time. Failing exams is a costly habit that I have tried to give up. Of course you can send yourself on courses and go to boot camps and buy training software but all of these are only worth the amount of effort that you are willing to put in.

If you are new to the industry then be warned of thinking that you could get these exams and then walk into a good job. You will still find it very hard to get a job, but it will give you the edge over people without this qualification.

People with relevant experience should breeze through most of these and they really should have them to keep themselves on top of the pile of CV's.

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