Let's inspect Microsoft role‑based certifications in the
Windows Server Hybrid Administrator job role.
You should understand, first of all,
that Microsoft certifications nowadays are aligned not to their products,
but to job roles,
and those job roles are aggregated into four tiers as you can see on the slide.
The Fundamentals level are the exams and certifications that give
you ground level general familiarity with a job.
For example, AZ‑900 is Azure Fundamentals.
Now the thing with the Fundamentals certification is
that there's no experience required,
and Microsoft even aims these at non‑technical people,
so they're a great place to start if you're brand new to one of these job roles.
Most of the Microsoft certifications are at the Associate,
or Practitioner, level.
This is where we have the Hybrid Cloud Administrator.
There are fewer expert certifications.
These normally have prerequisites associated with them.
The Microsoft DevOps Expert and Microsoft Azure Architect Expert are
two expert‑level certs that are pretty popular.
And lastly, Microsoft has a number of one‑off specialty certifications.
There's one on Cosmos DB database development,
for example, and another on SAP database on Azure.
If you're sensing a theme here, yes,
it's true that with the exception of this Hybrid Administrator certification,
all of the other Microsoft role‑based certifications are
squarely and 100% in the Microsoft Cloud Platform.
I don't know how far back you date with Microsoft certification,
but Microsoft has never been particularly gifted at labeling their exams.
They've got it down pretty well nowadays,
I will say, to where the exam IDs have a prefix that's actually meaningful.
AZ exams are focused on Azure, at least principally Azure.
DP is data platform.
MS is the Microsoft 365 family.
SC is security compliance.
AI, artificial intelligence.
The exam ID will also have a numeric counterpart.
For example, AZ‑900 is Azure Fundamentals, DP‑900 is Data Platform Fundamentals.
You see, so the 900 exams are aligned to the fundamental certifications.
And then there is some variability to a degree,
but Microsoft Worldwide Learning tries to be consistent here.
The 100 exams are administrator, 200 developer,
300 architect, 500 security,
and then when we're talking about Windows Server Hybrid Administrator,
it's 800, so you make sense of that if you can or if you want to.
I'm just going to quietly continue.
So, for example, like I said, to put the exam ID rubric together,
DP‑900 we can see must be a Data Platform Fundamentals,
and it is.
AZ‑104 would be Azure Administrator Associate.
MS‑500 would be the Microsoft 365 Security certification. Make sense?