Extreme now has proctored exams

[Mike28]

Wow, for years I have been taking Extreme Certifications for every product line. When people ask what Certs I have, I tell them, and answer the follow up question "Who is Extreme Networks!" Never have they been monitored, until now...Thanks Extreme you have finally reached CISCO level. I don't know what else to say, very disappointed.

Here is from the Technical Training Data Sheet:

"Extreme Networks technical training exams are considered high- stakes exams and are independently proctored by ProctorU, with one attempt of the related exam included within the standard course fee (this is regardless of whether the student has completed instructor-led training or self-paced eLearning).Further exam attempts can be purchased if required at an additional cost of $395. All exams can be registered for and administered within the Extreme Networks Learning Portal using an individual’s existing portal log-in. Students have

1 hour to complete the exam. An exam will be considered Passed with a score of 75% or above."

PS your not a high-stakes Cert!!! The last few acquisitions you have become less and less Extreme, I see all the quality Engineers leaving, and your customer loyalty waning. I guess it is all about the money. This is how you stay in 3rd place!

Signed,
Less likely to lead Purple!

[Rohan_Abeysuriy]

Hi, I’ve not been able to get back to this thread for a while, so I wanted to give a summary of what we’re doing to address some of the topics raised here….

• Printed Course Materials – based on customer feedback we will enable students to either view course materials on line, print them to paper or save/print to their devices as PDF. Whichever is their preference. This will be in place for courses running from January.
• Architect/Expert Certs – Following the completion of acquisitions earlier this year we conducted a full review of all training courses and concluded that all content needed updating or creating as new. We’ve been focused on the base layer of technical training development first, for all our expanded portfolio including new video-based content to compliment the classroom courses. New classroom courses for Campus Fabric, Advance Fabric and Data Center have been added to the training schedule in the second half of this year. We’ll release the first video-based course before the festive holidays. Whilst this work is in progress we’re also planning the next wave of content development which includes additional training for Advance Deployments, Configuration and Troubleshooting. As part of this, we plan to announce an updated Certification program in May 2019 at the ExtremeConnect event in Nashville. Check out the event at https://extremeconnect.co/ it will be great learning and networking experience.
• Pricing – We’ve reviewed feedback about pricing and we will announce changes at the end of January 2019.
• Proctored Exams – As previously mentioned we removed the external exam proctoring process based on feedback given here and from other customer and partners.

We’re busy modernizing our training model to support the new Extreme with investment in new content, training labs and systems. We hope you will see the fruits of the work we've been doing recently as we go through 2019.

I’ll keep coming back here when we have updates to share. Kind Regards, Rohan

[Steve_Burke]

Hello Tomasz,

Agreed it appears Extreme has changed their programs for Partners to the new Dojo Program and may very well be in the process of redesigning the customer training offerings as well. Unfortunately for non-partners they dismantled the existing design without a new design to replace it with so we are left empty handed.

My employer provided professional development and funded me to attend each of the ECS courses to obtain ECE which we now realized has been discontinued. If we were aware of the volatility of the Extreme training/certification program I'm sure my employer would have invested my time and their finances elsewhere. While I am aware there are networking certifications that have greater recognition and appeal there is still benefit to having Extreme certifications - especially when the equipment in the environment is Extreme.

We were unaware the training was moved from US to UK and that the higher level certifications were eliminated. This was recently discovered when I reached out to our sales rep who informed me to register for re-cert online and that payment can be made directly on the portal instead of having to purchase the credits after enrollment like we had done in previous years.

Unfortunately that is when we discovered ECE and ECA weren't on the portal and were no longer available. I reached out to Diane Noyes and the generic learn@extremenetworks.com e-mail address only to discover Diane is no longer employed by Extreme. I did hear back from the learn team and the quoted responses I provided above were from that team essentially instructing me to simply take the ECS exams over again if I want but ECE and ECA are no longer available.

I believe Rohan is the Director of Training at Extreme and in a position to answer the questions posted in this thread as well as consider the feedback discussed. He has has already received my feedback and I was informed he would be in touch within a few days - unfortunately that was almost two weeks ago so I decided to post here.

These changes came as a surprise to me and the lack of information is concerning. I figured since Partners have positioning they may have information from conferences and communications we do not and could share any additional information they had.

[Tomasz]

Hi Steve,

ECE is gone for a year, and somebody should pass that information. Those three separate ECS exams should be available for you, I'm not sure but probably there is some promo for former-ECE for that.

I also regret that there's nothing above ECS, my personal goal was to achieve ECA to feel good that I know at least something about the technology, but suddenly... poof, gone. I'm good with that, though, it's nothing to be compared with certificate ladder like at some other big vendors where you spend weeks to study the material and learn by heart what's going on inside packet headers. But I hope that growing recognition of Extreme will make Extreme certificates more valuable on the market, and certification levels could help with that, but it seems like there might be some different strategy right now.
ECSs are somewhat a good starting point to learn the technology (they could be modified, as always, but I appreciate huge free-time buffer to enhance the lab scenarios), free-of-charge EDS might also be useful (knowledge transfer and design guide for Access Control!), but today there is a big accent put on those partner specializations (ECS+EDS+ESS) so when a reseller gets couple of those, it gets 'Master' specialization for some portfolio area (three Master specializations are there). It's much about rebates and if I'm not wrong, getting all those certs (separate or combined as Master) gives significant advantage over competition, of course if you do a lot of sales (consider certifications as an investment that has to return).
But if you are a customer... You don't need Master for anything, so it's a really short time of a gameplay.
I'm not the sales guy so I don't see that business and profit margin perspective of resellers, I agree that for any engineer it is better to have better motivation (gamification!) to develop your skills and knowledge, and it could be something more than just a single 4-day class.
There is some Extreme Dojo program going on but I didn't went into details yet.

Regarding training team of Extreme here, I just see Rohan, maybe it's nobody else here so if you wish to give more feedback, I believe learn@extremenetworks.com might be a way better option.

Kind regards,
Tomasz

[Ronald_Dvorak]

Disappointment & frustration are the two words that come to mind if you ask me about Extreme training & certification.

For me it looks like that the training dept just gave up as they don't even bother to answer question/requests (see posts above).

Good luck for the re-cert... if that is even possible....
https://community.extremenetworks.com/extremewireless-identifi-230294/exam-access-wireless-mia-78226...