Microsoft Office 2013 Certification

Waiting time is over: finally, new Microsoft Office 2013 certification exams are available since mid-March.

Microsoft Office Specialist 2013 (MOS) exams for Word 2013 and Excel 2103 are out and other MOS 2013 exams are scheduled for release throughout this year, except for SharePoint 2013 and OneNote 2013 exams that are on the release schedule in 2014.

Performance based testing have always been present in MOS exams as well as tasks that have to be completed in a live, working environment, that is, in a real application.

This time, in MOS 2013 series exams, candidates have to complete a project during the test, opposed to completing specific tasks in previous MOS 2010 and MOS 2007 exams. This makes testing experience a bit more challenging but more relevant.

MOS exams can be taken at Certiport testing centers worldwide using Certiport Testing center Locator.

Look at the table below to plan your studies and to get an overview of exam release schedule. Of course, release dates are subject to change so be sure to check this blog, Certiport and Microsoft MOS related web pages for exam availability when planning your studies.

MOS 2013 Certification Exam Release Schedule

EXAM	Exam Number	English	Chinese Traditional	Korean	Japanese
Word 2013 – Core	77-418	Available	Q4 2013	Q4 2013	Q1 2014
Excel 2013 – Core	77-420	Available	Q4 2013	Q4 2013	Q1 2014
PowerPoint 2013	77-422	June 2013
Access 2013	77-424	June 2013
Word 2013 – Expert	77-419	Q3 2013
Excel 2013 – Expert	77-421	Q3 2013
Outlook 2013	77-423	Q4 2013
SharePoint 2013	77-425	2014
OneNote 2013	77-426	2014

 

Use this links to read Preparation Guides or Skills Measured:

MOS: Microsoft Office Word 2013 (Exam 77-418)

MOS: Microsoft Office Word 2013 Expert (Exam 77-419)

MOS: Microsoft Office Excel 2013 (Exam 77-420)

MOS: Microsoft Office Excel 2013 Expert (Exam 77-421)

MOS: Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2013 (Exam 77-422)

MOS: Microsoft Office Outlook 2013 (Exam 77-423)

MOS: Microsoft Office Access 2013 (Exam 77-424)

MOS: Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (Exam 77-425)

MOS: Microsoft Office OneNote 2013 (Exam 77-426)

 

Information about Microsoft Office Specialist exams can be found on official Microsoft Learning MOS page.

If you are an MCT, don’t forget that you are eligible for a FREE MOS exam voucher every year!

Good luck!

Ah, memories!

Few day ago I was going through some long (lost) forgotten stuff when I found this baby – Toshiba T3300SL Laptop!

Look at the specifications:

Intel 386SL Processor, 2MB RAM, 80MB Hard Disk, 3,5’’ 1,44MB Floppy Drive, Centronics and RS-232C port, 9,5’’ VGA 640×480 display, with only 2,7kg!

Take a look at the brochure:

Oh, memories…

 

What is this? HAL? Cyclops’ eye? It’s Microsoft Trackball, with four (4) buttons!

Program Manager in full-screen:

About box shows Windows version 3.1! Those were the times…

Microsoft Word version 6.0:

And Microsoft Excel version 4.0!

MS-DOS QBasic version 1.0

 

Windows setup screen. Notice the Disk Space Currently Used By Components? Barely 2 MB!

Some serious advanced settings…

For the end: partition information.

Disk size is 82 MB!

How to have relevant and current skills in ’cloudy’ times?

This year Microsoft Certification celebrates 20th birthday! It is an important birthday as this year is THE year of important changes. But, a bit more about that later.

What was going on twenty years ago, what happened around year 1992?

Microsoft Windows 3.0 was introduced in 1990; Windows 3.1 two years later, Microsoft Windows NT shipped in July 1993, Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95 saw the daylight in 1995.

Do you remember what the typical internet connection speed was back then? It is funny and interesting to remember speeds in Kbps and acronyms such as BBS and Gopher. I remember turning off loading pictures in Netscape Navigator (!) to speed up page loading because the text was what we were looking for and pictures were (un)necessary evil. I started surfing the Internet with speeds of 9600 Kbps and couple of years later I bought a US Robotics 56K modem for a price that was between today’s prices of a 128MB and 256MB SSD drive.

Today, people talk about clouds and cloud computing almost everywhere as if the terminology has been always with us. Speed is measured in tens of Megabits per second (Mbps), video is streaming in HD resolution on our 42’ LCD screens, cell (mobile) phones are useless without an internet connection.

Take a look at this infographic to see the history of Internet usage and speeds:

Infographic: From Horseback To Bullet Train: The History Of Internet Usage And Speeds by WebHostingBuzz

Typical computing environment today is light years away from what it was 20 years ago. Not only software and hardware has evolved but also has administration, engineering, deployment and maintenance. Our workplaces evolved too and the way we work has changed significantly. We can work everywhere: on a train, over the ocean, on mobile phones, very often keeping files stored centrally, ‘’in the cloud’’. This way files are synchronized and up-to-date all the time, accessible from virtually everywhere.

If you work in or around IT industry you probably have already witnessed the shift in the skills IT professionals need to have. As the technology has evolved so our skills need to evolve to be able to configure, manage, deploy, operate or design these cloud enabled environments.

Microsoft Learning and Microsoft certifications have always followed the technology and stayed current and aligned with the products: from Windows NT to the latest and greatest Windows Server 2008 R2; from Windows 95 to Windows 7. Microsoft certifications today validate skills on almost every Microsoft product or technology.

If you have taken Microsoft certification exams in the past, you certainly noticed how exams have changed. Microsoft Learning kept their exam development process relevant and changed the way exams are developed. The exam experience is now very different from what it was before. This is a good change for the mutual benefit.

Following table shows some big improvements in exam development process:

Today	Back Then
External subject matter experts write items	Product groups wrote items or hired contractors to write items
More interactive item types are being added to exams; in fact, most new exams will contain a minimum of 3 different item types	We used mostly multiple choice items
You will not see true/false items on our exams (good T/F items are very difficult to write well and easy to guess)	A few true/false questions were sprinkled through our first exams
We’re pilot testing a short answer “fill in the blank” code snippet item type on our code based exams	Our very first exams had a few short answer “fill in the blank” types of questions but these were removed because of scoring was extremely complex
External subject matter experts review items	Items were reviewed by internal Microsoft employees
Beta exams are free	Beta exams cost $50
External subject matter experts set the cut score	The cut score was set by internal Microsoft employees

(Table taken from Born To Learn post 20 Years of Certification: Exams Grow Up)

New technologies are “cloud enabled” and “cloud capable“; new technologies inevitably include cloud-related skills. IT Professionals and Developers need to validate new skills and Microsoft Private Cloud Certification is good example.

Beta exams were available in April and they should be published by July. The private cloud certification builds upon the skills on Windows Server 2008 as the foundation and extends onto validating skills with deployment, operation and monitoring with System Center 2012 range of products.

It is not too late if you have not started yet. But do not delay, start planning and learning today by achieving MCITP Server Administrator certification!

Good luck!