Azure Certification History from EPAM Experience

In 2019-2020, we ran a Microsoft Azure training and certification program.



In this article, I decided to sum up my results of this event, which stretched out for 12 months.



In 2019, no one expected what this program would grow into (3500+ participants from 27 countries, 11 different certificates).



The process, which took 12 months, I divided into 3 stages:

• PoC (Proof of Concept) - verification of the approach
• MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) and its piloting
• Deploy the program to the entire company

There are official press releases from EPAM and Microsoft , but there is enough general information.

Why are we doing this?

• On the one hand, any engineer needs to constantly master something new in order to keep up with project requests.
• According to my personal statistics (I participate in the process of staffing engineers for projects in our department) - from 30 to 50% of positions come with an explicit indication of the knowledge of one of the large Cloud providers. This is a must have skill for our department. I'm not ready to speak for other companies or at least departments.
• Any client / project manager would prefer to hire a specialist with experience in the required technology, rather than rely on "quick learning".
• And this program was also a personal challenge for me ...

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PoC

It all started in July 2019, when, as a trainer, I conducted the first / experimental course on az-203 for 18 people in Minsk.

If you do not go into details, the reviews were very controversial. After analyzing the reasons, we came to the following conclusions:

• The course must be done completely remote
  (COVID-19 was not even on the horizon at the time)

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• The course should be stretched in time for several weeks or even months without interrupting production. people can't just go out for a week or two from their projects. Training has to be combined with ongoing project work.
• The course must be "from scratch",
  regardless of the entry level of the participant

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In addition, it became clear that there are not enough official courses for Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) to prepare people for the exam and / or actual project work.



Before the start of the MVP phase, we made another approach to the projectile. Preparation process templates were created. Essentially: a list of labs, links to official documentation, to Microsoft Learn. In 2019, Microsoft learn was much more modest than it is now, and could not completely shut down exam preparation.



Links to these self-paced templates / scripts have been sent out to a wide audience for feedback. The result of this was the understanding that it is better not to give completely to self-learning without supervision (supervising), because there will be no progress visibility, and a person in a team learns better - competitive moments spur him on.

Microsoft came

By September, Microsoft representatives came to us (Microsoft Competency Center and Learn & Development department) as part of the partner program and told that there is such an Enterprise Skill Initiative, thanks to which we could get up to 250 vouchers for passing exams for free. And if out of 250 issued vouchers, 40 confirmed certificates are received, then you can repeat it endlessly (although it was possible to repeat it only 4 times). There were other options in the program: such as payment for training in certified training centers (20 of them, it seems) and webinars from Microsoft itself in the amount of 2 pieces.

• We said a big thank you for the vouchers .
• But we decided not to send our employees to training centers in Russian-speaking countries
  for a variety of reasons:

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• We also decided not to use courses from Microsoft itself in Russian-speaking countries for the same reasons as places in partner training centers.

MVP / First big launch

The launch was done in several passes, because I had to see in a large audience how people would react to the format, whether I could “lead” several hundred people, how streaming tools would work, MSTeams to maintain the level of engagement, etc. Fail Fast on a scale of 400 people, not as bad as in thousands.

• Since September 2019, we have simultaneously started the AZ-900 course in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The AZ-900 went well right away and it became clear that the format was working.
• And Az-203 only in Belarus. Almost immediately, colleagues from Russia and Ukraine began to come with a request “do it for us too,” which only emphasized the interest in the course. From the middle of the course, we added them (colleagues from Russia and Ukraine), and to the first 3 modules we simply gave access to the recording. AZ-203 had some content criticism that I described earlier .
• After finishing AZ-900, I was able to start AZ-103 with an already clear process.

We did not have time to start other courses by the end of 2019 (and there was no goal), because need time. In addition, the end of the year is always a hot period for projects.



As a result, by the end of 2019, about 800 people passed through our training programs, hundreds of one and a half passed .

Offline Certification event in Minsk

In November 2019, the Certification Event was held in Minsk.

Total: about 80% of those who passed, and among those who entered the AZ-203 (azure development) exam, 100% passed.



The participants positively assessed this event, asked to be held, at least, in Kiev and St. Petersburg, but in February 2020 COVID-19 made its own adjustments

Microsoft came for the second time

At the end of November, Microsoft came up with an interesting proposal: if you collect 350 certificates in this training program, then we can make a campaign together. Okay, “challenge accepted”.

As a nice bonus to this offer, we were able to get tests on the MeasureUp platform, which we used as the final control of knowledge at the end of the program.

Deploy the program to the entire company.

Between November and February, we were preparing for the big launch at all locations and simultaneously ending up with those who were in the first big launch. We updated the content, coordinated the texts of the announcements, added / rewrote instructions, planned in which cities we would do offline delivery. We were joined by Data Practice with courses for Azure Data Engineer and Data Scientist.

The final course list included: Azure for administrators, developers, architects, devops, data engineers / scientists, and fundamentals.



We provided vouchers for exams in Azure Security, Azure SAP, Azure IoT and Azure AI (Bots & Cognitive Services) for those who could prove their knowledge - we provided without programs.



To be sure of the quality of the preparatory material, the level of difficulty of the exams and to confidently answer any questions from the participants, I decided to personally prepare and pass all available Azure exams at that time.



As a result, we gathered about 2800 people, with whom we began training.

I had to work for such an audience in a completely different way. We started with the data for the first launch,and the number of exams passed on a specific date

(do not try to deduce our passing percentage from this schedule, since this is a snapshot of data on two specific certificates)

And he burst out

In March, COVID reached us, and with it the entire global economic and psychological situation. For a whole month, our Azure Certification Org Team worked in the operational headquarters mode. I had to rebuild on the go.



The engineers settled in their homes and instead of studying, every 5 minutes they updated feeds with news on the epidemiological situation . We saw this even from the activity in MSTeams.



In addition, I had to actively delve into many regional and individual features, some of which are described in the article .



Obviously, we froze plans for holding events in offices , made the most detailed instructions for delivery from home. I have provided some of the tips in this article .



Test centers either closed themselves, or people were not ready to go to them, and EPAM also forbade employees to take them so that people would not risk their health once again. As a result, 3-4 weeks were spent reassigning the exam through the online proctor.



At the same time, questions came from the office in China : “Why should we do something, everything is opening up here ?! "



At the end of April, Microsoft said that due to the economic situation caused by COVID, the number of cycles for issuing sets of 250 vouchers has become limited and our limit is only 1000 vouchers (although according to the original rules, taking into account the certificates already passed, we could at least count one thousand so that, for example, in the fall after the release of az-104 / az-204 / az-303 / az-304 to renew all our certificates) . Because of this, I urgently had to change my plans for issuing, introduce prioritization, and change the rules for retaking.



The situation stabilized only by the end of April.The online surrender processes were more or less worked out and predictable, people's nervousness went away, the sun came out.

To further push people to pass the exams, we asked those who have already passed to take a photo of themselves in front of the #CertifyAtHome hashtag with their certificates. The sense of humor of some of the participants was a pleasant surprise.

Features of issuing and counting vouchers

We did the counting of certificates in Excel on PowerQuery, so that from 2 data sources (a report from the Microsoft Partner Center and a list of issued vouchers, where we manually marked the exams passed), we calculate the received certificates for different reports (internal and for Microsoft), and then do join with reference data of employees in order to understand how many certificates we have in each city / country.

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At the end of April 2020, according to the Microsoft certificate counting method, we fulfilled our obligations to Microsoft, although most of our engineers had not even had time to take the exam. Marketing activity began, and we continued our training and certification program, since vouchers remained, and it’s not right to stop learning.



It is especially pleasant that our success rate for exams was ~ 85% of those who were given vouchers. The exact (from a scientific point of view) reason is difficult to establish, but I believe that such statistics were achieved by a voluminous training program and final control of knowledge through tests on MeasureUp.



For the engineers, we were able to arrange an opportunity to chat with Scott Hanselman.