So the SharePoint Team Blog announced two new certifications around SharePoint. The Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) and the Microsoft Certified Architect.

Resources

We were having discussions internally about this at Readify just today and what we look for in an individual. There was hot debate around whether we should mandate configuration and administration skills for a SharePoint Developer/Architect or whether that is a completely separate role. We came to the conclusion that to be a strong leading SharePoint Developer you have to understand the platform at this level and have had experience with installations and configuring the underlying platform. There is so much under the surface in Central Administration/STSADM etc. that you can leverage as a developer!

New Direction

This course is following in Cisco's efforts of certifying people in person and not just letting them take a tick box "monkey push the button" type exam format! They'll most likely have scenarios set up to prove your troubleshooting skills, debugging web parts or fixing a crawl that isn't working with authentication issues...or even worse still Kerberos!

Experience

I can understand why they are asking for SPS 2003 or CMS 2003 experience to get people with more than 2 years experience, lets face it MOSS 2007 Beta 2 hasn't been out that long and only RTM'd in November 2006.

One thing to bear in mind is if you're after a highly experienced SharePoint resource, you can pretty much rip the experience required for this course and slap it in a Job Description...can see Recruiters probably cutting and pasting as we speak!

Price

It seems overly expensive at $18,500USD and I can't see many companies paying for their staff to go on the course and I'm sure as hell anyone that good at SharePoint doesn't need a badge to prove it either!

Be interesting to see who goes on the course first and what they think of it...anyone booked already?

Dev Masters + Infra/IT Masters

I noticed that @JoelOleson has put a post out there on this and these were the responses on Twitter by @andrewconnell and @harbars. Joel's comments on Infra/IT and Dev camps hit home with our discussions today and that maybe in a commercial reality you need your Devs to be able to do installs. There aren't many companies out there with large teams of SharePoint resources that can split them into two camps! I still believe that Infrastructure specialists in general who would normally build Exchange etc. don't want to go near SharePoint and it's an extremely specialist area for them to get into! And get BURNT by.

Joel also discusses about Design Masters, Dev Masters and IT Masters. I tend to agree with Design Masters not needing to know the entire ins and outs of BDC or Enterprise Search for example and vice versa on Dev Masters. But the whole separate role for IT Masters is just something I haven't witnessed out there in that space. I'm sure they'll be more posts about this shortly!