The names we use for certifications are important.  They should communicate clearly what they represent someone can do and how they relate to one another.  Three years ago we made some policy and structure changes to provide more flexibility and choices for people participating in the certification program.  We are now making another choice to make Red Hat Certification a better tool for IT professionals and for organizations that use Red Hat technologies.

Effective December 1, 2017, all Red Hat Certificates of Expertise will be rebranded as Red Hat Certified Specialist.  For example, the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Deployment and Systems Management will become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Deployment and Systems Management.  Other titles will use this same convention.  We want to make it absolutely clear to everyone that these credentials are Red Hat certifications, not end of course certificates or something else.

While we are at it, we will also change the titles of Red Hat Certified JBoss Administrator (RHCJA) and Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA) to Red Hat Certified Specialist in Enterprise Application Server Administration and Red Hat Certified Specialist in Virtualization, respectively.  

We will also make a few additional tweaks to titles that we believe provide greater clarity.  For example, the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Hybrid Cloud Storage will become Red Hat Certified Specialist in Gluster Storage Administration.  At the time we launched this credential, Red Hat offered one storage-focused product, Red Hat Gluster Storage.  With the acquisition of InkTank, we also have Red Hat Ceph Storage.  Making this small change will provide more when we introduce a Ceph-focused certification (which we will soon.)  We will provide greater specificity by converting the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Performance Tuning into Red Hat Certified Specialist in Linux Performance Tuning and more clarity by renaming the Red Hat Certificate of Expertise in Platform-as-a-Service as Red Hat Certified Specialist in OpenShift Administration.

If you are a Red Hat Certified Professional who holds one of these credentials, you might be wondering whether you can get a new electronic certificate with the new title.  You can!  Log into redhat.com, then go to Certifications to get to your certification profile.  If you have mapped your certification ID to your redhat.com username, then you should see a download link in your profile next to each certification that is current.  These links provide your certificates.  This capability is available for all your certifications, not just the ones with changed titles.

Contact the certification team if you have questions or concerns about certifications you have earned or exams you have taken.

 


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About the author

Randy Russell is the director of Certification and leads the team that develops and delivers Red Hat's certification programs and exams.  A long-time proponent of performance-based testing, he has served on the board and as president and chairman of the Performance Testing Council, as well as having presented on this subject and others at industry conferences such as the Association of Test Publishers, the European Association of Test Publishers, CeDMA and TSIA.  Prior to joining Red Hat, Russell was a system administrator and programmer at an environmental economics consulting firm.

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