Certifications

CAMS certification has a straightforward headline requirement—qualify, apply, schedule, and pass—but candidates can lose time when they begin studying before they understand the eligibility and application rules. The Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialist credential is administered by ACAMS, and the current process requires both an active ACAMS membership and enough eligibility credits before an application can be approved. ACAMS positions CAMS as a specialist-level anti-money-laundering credential for professionals working in or moving toward anti-financial-crime roles. The application is therefore designed to recognize a combination of education, professional experience, and relevant training…

Microsoft DP-203, Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure, retired on March 31, 2025. It is no longer a schedulable certification exam. The closest current Microsoft data-engineering path is Microsoft DP-700, which earns the Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification. The useful way to handle old DP-203 preparation is to preserve the durable engineering skills while moving the platform-specific study plan to Microsoft Fabric. What still transfers from DP-203 The fundamentals did not disappear with the exam. Data engineers still need to ingest data reliably, choose appropriate storage, transform data, orchestrate pipelines, secure…

Both the Palo Alto Networks Certified Network Security Administrator (PCNSA) and Certified Network Security Engineer (PCNSE) exams are retired. PCNSA retired on January 31, 2025, followed by PCNSE on July 31, 2025. Their old examination fee comparisons therefore describe history, not prices for certifications a candidate can book in 2026. Palo Alto Networks now organizes certifications around job-ready Network Security, Security Operations and Cloud Security skills. A useful budget starts with the active credential that matches your work and includes registration, appropriate training, permitted lab access and preparation time. The…

Microsoft AZ-800 retired on September 30, 2026, so “reasons to prepare for AZ-800” must now be reframed as reasons to reuse that preparation for AZ-802: Administering Windows Server. Candidates who already studied the old hybrid core exam have a valuable head start, but they should stop following retired domain weights and rebuild the plan around the current consolidated exam. Keep the identity foundation AD DS, DNS, authentication, group policy, and hybrid identity remain essential. Review them as an operating system of dependencies rather than isolated facts. Practice diagnosing sign-in failures…

PL-200 retired on August 31, 2026, so a preparation guide that still tells candidates how to pass Microsoft Power Platform Functional Consultant is pointing at a closed exam. Microsoft replaced that certification direction with AB-410: Building Intelligent Applications. The best transition is to keep the durable business-application skills from PL-200 and reorganize them around the current intelligent-app builder role. Start by separating durable skills from retired blueprint details Requirements discovery, Dataverse, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, security, environments, integrations, and solution lifecycle remain valuable. Retired percentages, old question emphasis,…

Microsoft SC-900 remains current as of October 6, 2026. Microsoft’s current English scope is dated July 28, and the certification page announces an English update on October 21. The exam is designed for people who want foundational understanding of security, compliance, and identity across Microsoft cloud services. A good study plan should move from concepts to Microsoft Entra, then to Microsoft security solutions, and finally to Microsoft compliance solutions, while keeping the distinctions between those layers clear. Stage 1: establish security, compliance, and identity vocabulary SC-900 identity, security, and compliance…

Cisco 300-410 ENARSI is valuable because advanced enterprise routing problems rarely fail in simple ways. A route can be learned from the wrong source, redistributed back toward its origin, filtered by policy, hidden by summarization, installed in the wrong VRF, or preferred because an attribute changed somewhere else in the topology. The professional skill is not knowing more commands; it is being able to explain why the network selected a path and what will happen when that path changes. The current Cisco 300-410 ENARSI v1.1 exam is 90 minutes and…

Google Cloud’s Professional Data Engineer certification validates the ability to design, build, secure, operate, and optimize data workloads on Google Cloud. It is a professional credential rather than an introductory data badge, and Google currently recommends at least three years of industry experience including more than one year designing and managing solutions with Google Cloud. The standard exam is two hours long, costs $200 before applicable taxes, and contains 40–50 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions in English or Japanese. There are no formal prerequisites, but the recommended experience level is important…

AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate has become the main AWS certification for professionals who build and operate data pipelines. The current DEA-C01 exam is not an analytics-theory test and it is not a database-only credential. It validates the ability to ingest and transform data, choose and manage data stores, operate pipelines, troubleshoot them, and apply security and governance controls across the data lifecycle. As of October 2026, DEA-C01 remains current. AWS’s latest exam guide describes 50 scored questions plus 15 unscored questions, uses a 720 scaled passing score, and…

The AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate (DEA-C01) tests whether a candidate can build, operate and secure data pipelines on AWS. Preparation works best when it combines the current issuer blueprint with a small end-to-end system that can fail, recover and produce trustworthy data. The Amazon AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate DEA-C01 page is an ExamSnap study resource; confirm its coverage against AWS’s current exam guide. AWS describes an ideal candidate with roughly two to three years of data-engineering experience, including one to two years working with AWS services….

AZ-400 is not a generic “learn Azure DevOps” exam. Microsoft positions it as the professional assessment for DevOps engineers who connect people, processes, source control, build and release automation, security, monitoring, and feedback into a continuous delivery system. The current English-language skills outline was updated on July 27, 2026, and it remains heavily weighted toward build and release pipelines. Passing AZ-400 is only one part of the Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert path. Candidates must also hold either Azure Administrator Associate or Azure Developer Associate. That prerequisite matters because Microsoft…

AWS Certified Security – Specialty has moved beyond SCS-C02. AWS used SCS-C02 through December 1, 2025 and switched to SCS-C03 on December 2, 2025. Candidates preparing in 2026 should therefore treat SCS-C02 as a legacy blueprint and build their study plan around the current SCS-C03 Security – Specialty exam. The certification still validates advanced AWS security skills, but the updated blueprint reorganizes the work around detection, incident response, infrastructure security, identity and access management, data protection, and security foundations and governance. AWS also added newer security concerns, including integrations using…

The AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate track changed materially in September 2026. MLA-C01 is no longer available in English as of September 28, while the MLA-C02 beta began delivery on September 29. MLA-C01 remains available for Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese candidates during the beta period, with AWS planning full MLA-C02 general availability on January 14, 2027. That makes the old “MLA-C01 preparation guide” framing incomplete for most candidates studying in English today. The certification still validates the engineering work required to build, deploy, operate, and secure machine…

The older ITIL 4 Foundation path remains relevant during the transition and for legacy search intent. ITIL Foundation Version 5 is the current certification entry point for new ITIL learners. ITIL Foundation Version 5 is the current entry point into ITIL. PeopleCert is introducing Version 5 through a phased transition; ITIL 4 remains available during that transition, with the current plan to sunset ITIL 4 modules on December 31, 2027. ITIL 4 Foundation holders can use the ITIL Foundation Bridge (Version 5) route instead of repeating the full Foundation content….

AZ-140 is a current Microsoft exam for administrators who design, implement, manage, and maintain Azure Virtual Desktop environments. Microsoft’s July 20, 2026 skills outline makes the scope clear: the role combines Azure infrastructure, identity, security, user environments, applications, profiles, and day-to-day operations. That makes AZ-140 a difficult exam to prepare for through memorization alone. A virtual desktop session can fail because of host capacity, networking, identity, FSLogix, application delivery, policy, storage, or user-profile state. Candidates need enough hands-on experience to separate those layers when something goes wrong. The best study…