4 steps to build and validate skills with Red Hat Certification

Red Hat Certification is a high-value, performance-based credential that builds your skills in realistic IT scenarios and verifies your expertise to the world. Red Hat Training offers comprehensive courses and hands-on practice, with recommended paths to prepare for your certification exams.

By combining rigorous learning with skill validation, our programs have been proven to deliver significant business results, including a 25% to 50% increase in day-to-day IT efficiency, a 77% rise in the effectiveness of new hires, and a reduction in IT turnover.¹

Read this checklist to learn how to strategically prepare for any Red Hat Certification exam, and discover how to maximize the benefits of these credentials through Red Hat Training.

Red Hat Certification offers a diverse range of certification paths for all types of IT professionals, ranging from system administrators to cloud-native developers to security specialists and more.

Explore the complete list of exams to understand the real-world skills being offered by each certification path, review official exam objectives, and discover recommended training to take to prepare for the exam.

If you are unsure where to start your certification journey, the Red Hat Skills Assessment is a strategic, no-cost tool to help identify the most relevant and valuable certification offerings based on you or your organization’s existing skills and goals.

Red Hat Certification exams are in-depth, performance-based tests that require completion of real-world tasks, which means you should prepare with as much practice as possible.

Each exam comes with recommended Red Hat Training courses, created and validated by Red Hat experts, designed with an outcome-based approach, and offered in over 200 countries, multiple languages, and many formats.

These courses—which can be found listed with each exam in the Red Hat exam catalog—form a structured learning path with cloud-based labs to practice solving challenges with Red Hat technologies in realistic IT environments. 

You can further optimize learning outcomes with the Red Hat Learning Subscription. This flexible, cost-effective training solution has subscription tiers for individuals and organizations and offers ongoing access to the Red Hat Training curriculum, as well as added capabilities to help you prepare for Red Hat exams.

This includes Exam Experience (XE) exams, which replicate the remote exam setup to help you familiarize and prepare for the certification attempt.

Once you have built up your skills and feel confident in achieving your objectives with Red Hat Certification, schedule your exam and select the testing format that works best for you or your organization.

To book your exam, navigate to your desired exam in the Red Hat Certification exam catalog, choose your country, and purchase the exam. You will then receive instructions on how to schedule the time and location.

Red Hat Certification offers a range of exam formats, all live-proctored to deliver high standards of integrity:

• Remote access is available for individual exams on a compatible system so you can take the exam where it is most convenient and comfortable.
• Certify 6 employees or more directly from your organization’s location, with technical assistance provided remotely before the exam and on site during the exam.
• Conduct group or individual exams in personal testing stations with preconfigured hardware at Red Hat testing centers all around the world.

Keeping your Red Hat Certification current is key to staying aligned with rapidly changing technology.

Keep yourself or your organization up to date on the skills needed for the technology of today and tomorrow. By renewing your certifications before they expire, or continuing to build your skills to achieve the next level of certification, you benefit from updated learning materials that are aligned with current needs.

The Red Hat Learning Subscription helps you achieve this with ongoing and scalable access to the Red Hat Training curriculum, as well as early access to new technologies before official release.

By investing in continuous learning, you or your organization can build skills for long-term success by keeping up to date with emerging technologies, while minimizing the costs and inefficiency of having to hire externally to gain the skills you need.