Back in the summer of last year I took part in the Microsoft Cloud Skills Challenge during Microsoft Build, and managed to go through the material and earn a free certification attempt. I chose the SC-200: Microsoft Security Operations Analyst, and couple months later got my new shiny badge for passing the proctored exam. My first Microsoft Associate level certification, I was happy.
Microsoft Associate and Expert certifications are valid for one year, and then you have to renew them. The nice thing about this renewal is that is completely free of charge, and it’s just a little assesment without any proctoring required, and there are no limits on how many attempts you can take. Now obviously you only have 180 days to renew it, so technically you’re limited to 181 attempts (your second attempt can be right after the first one, but all subsequent attempts are once a day), but at that point you’ve practically already tried all possible answer combinations for the questions you have no idea about anyways, so even a completely blind approach would get you renewed, but you know what I mean.
So 180 days after passing the exam I get a notification email that tells me to renew my certification, and having some other things going on I’ll just let it sit for a little while. Finally I get around to it, and take my first attempt all cold. Utter failure, but completely expected. Brush up on the content over at Microsoft Learn, and next time the failure is a little less severe, but a failure nonetheless. Oof, I’ve really forgotten this stuff. Going over the stuff once more I pass the short 26 question assesment, and add another year to my certification validity. Yes, add - not renew it for another year from the date it expires.
All in all this type of renewal is absolutely perfect, as it completely removes the financial burden from the process, as well as the need to cram things and work under proctored supervision for the exam - just take it when you feel like it, and if you don’t pass, read up on things and try again. It’s an easy and nice way to make sure you stay current on your skills without any additional stress.
One thing that would be nice to see is that Expert level certifications that have Associate level certification requirements would automatically renew those as well, kinda the way CompTIA handles their certification renewals trickling down. The lower level certification expiration won’t make the higher one expire, so I suppose that you could just stop renewing those, but personally I’d like to see everything staying current anyway. Oh well, I’m still missing that first Expert certification anyway, but all in due time.