The Future Is in the Clouds: Ready to Join Us in Creating It?

The cloud is the future and the VMware certification team is developing a new credential that prepares learners to shape the future of cloud. The new course aligns VMware's multi-cloud solutions and that will validate the key skills required to modernize infrastructures, migrate to the cloud without recoding apps, and operate consistently across the data center, the edge and any cloud.

IDC reports in the "Strategies for Building Digital Infrastructure Resiliency," that enterprises expect virtual machines (VMs) and containers to co-exist and integrate to support multiple application generations. Workloads will migrate from one platform to another to improve performance, scalability and security. The complexity of managing multiple clouds and applications with grow, coinciding with the lack of IT ops data analytics and tools, the shortage of container and microservices skills, and the need to master each cloud's unique management functions. Simplifying platforms and management is critical to improving productivity, security and reliability across all functions. Having a single infrastructure software platform addresses these issues. Eighty-five percent of the survey participants stated it was important, if not mission critical, to use a single common shared control plane across VMs, containers, public clouds and on-premise infrastructures.

VMware offers the freedom of multi-cloud with the simplicity of one management platform. Using VMware Cloud on AWS and other hyperscalers, VMware Tanzu, VMware Cloud Foundation and other products, organizations are able to migrate seamlessly to any cloud, accelerate modern application development and operate consistently, anywhere. The new VMware multi-cloud certifications will validate the skills of infrastructure, cloud and application admins, and operators to successfully navigate, implement and support multi-cloud solutions.

The VMware certification portfolio also offers certifications in data center virtualization (using vSphere as a core platform), network virtualization (with VMware NSX-T as its focus), cloud automation and management, and migrating and running modern applications with VMware Tanzu. Each certification in each of these different tracks provides training and exams that prove expertise in a unique area of IT operations and infrastructure. The new multi-cloud certifications will bring in common required skills from each of those tracks, validating that when someone earns the credential, they can truly operate VMware technologies on any cloud and use cross-cloud services to provide a consistent experience no matter where workloads are hosted.

How SMEs create certification exams

When VMware builds certifications, we look for experienced IT professionals to act as subject matter experts (SMEs) to help us scope, write and score our exams. We are now looking for experienced SMEs across VMware Cloud, VCF, vSphere and other VMware solutions to help us complete our multi-cloud certification portfolio.

SMEs are critical to our process, ensuring that the exams are written appropriately to the skills required across data centers and cloud operations globally for different types of organizations. SMEs help in training and exam development to ensure the teaching and testing objectives that every candidate is measured against are accurate and relevant to the industry. In fact, although they may be written and presented differently, both the training and exam objectives come from the same competency model.

A competency model is a representation of the skills, knowledge and attributes required for a specific role within a certain domain. For example, consider a virtual infrastructure administrator using VMware solutions to manage their IT data center and cloud migration. The purpose of the competency model is to ensure that the scope of the training and certifications are aligned to the tasks, operations and work that are most needed and required in an organization. By using a competency model to base training and exam development, we ensure there is alignment and relevancy to our credentials.

The VMware Learning team guides SMEs through a process that pulls their expertise out of their heads and into a structured competency model. When completed, the competency model can reflect several levels of certifications and different types of skillsets and job roles. From the competency models, the SMEs help determine the scope of each exam, called an exam blueprint. It is the exam blueprint that determines how many exam items to ask for each objective and how much each of the objectives matter relative to each other (i.e. applying a weighted scoring scale to the objectives).

SMEs are the best people to write exams, because they actively work in the same job domain that the exam will cover. VMware trains the SMEs on how to write proper exam items, and then guides them through the exam writing process. Sometimes several hundred items may be written for an exam to ensure proper coverage of all the objectives and to allow for more than one set of questions, or form. Every exam candidate receives the same number of questions for each objective (according to the blueprint), ensuring that everyone is tested fairly and consistently, even though they may get different questions.

Once SMEs write the exam items that are then thoroughly vetted through technical, grammatical and accuracy reviews, we use a psychometrician to apply statistical measurements and to build the correct forms, determine the right passing score, and to allow for statistical measurements for any needed future improvements. It is this process that ensures that VMware certifications are fair, reliable and valid. Additionally, this step allows VMware to refer to its exams as legally defensible and relevant to everyone who takes them.

Ready to become a VMware contributor?

If you're interested in being a SME, and in particular helping build our multi-cloud certifications, please join us! Sign up here, where you'll fill out a form describing your areas of expertise, your availability and your interests. We will reach out to you with opportunities to join other SMEs in building our exams and certifications. And the best part, besides helping shape the future of your industry? For every contribution you make, you earn points that can be redeemed for VMware swag, learning discounts and more!