Today our team is excited to announce that we have reached an incredible landmark – we have awarded more than 25,000 Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certifications. We began conducting this award-winning performance-based testing program in 1999 and it has experienced incredible growth since.

Passing the 25,000 mark is an exciting milestone for this program. However, our focus has always been more on the quality of people we certify and the benefits these capable professionals provide to Red Hat customers than their number. Focusing on quality means that RHCEs can deploy and manage more systems per person, so being able to identify those people is a tangible benefit for customers.

This is a significant milestone that speaks to the program’s value, longevity and industry-leading status. No other Unix or Linux certification, and arguably, no other IT certification demonstrates competency and ensures instant credibility like RHCE.

IT professionals can prepare for the RHCE exam by attending Red Hat training courses taught by many of our own full-time employees, contractors and others affiliated with our training partners overseas. The exam itself is a hands-on, performance-based exam conducted on a live system. This approach provides a better measure of candidates’ abilities to build and administer Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Our company is the world’s largest vendor of Linux training and certification by revenue, sales, courses available and locations served. With the market majority of all Linux training in North America, our flagship certification, RHCE, is consistently named in the top 10 certifications in the industry. For example, RHCE was named the Hottest Certification for 2006 by CertCities.com.

Red Hat offers customers four levels of certifications: Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS) and Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA). Red Hat eLearning and developer courses are available at levels appropriate for both beginners and networking professionals looking to migrate to open source solutions and build or expand their experience with Linux-based operating systems.