SharePoint 2013 Certification - There is a developer track!

Something over a year ago I wrote an article on how I'd gained an appreciation of the benefits of SharePoint Certification and gained my own MCPD certs as a result. Now that the certification paths for SharePoint 2013 have been released it was time for me to take a look at the new picture.

Frankly the new SharePoint Certification track, the Microsoft Certified Solution Expert (MCSE) had me mystified. What are SharePoint developers supposed to do with it?

Thankfully, a little sanity is being restored to the world. Browsing the official site still only yields information about MCSE, but the blogosphere has leaked details of a developer track. The most promising details can be found here. Now I'm still hyperventilating somewhat but I'm getting calmer, Developers don't have to follow the MCSE. A Dev Track apparently exists, though a little more of a sneak peak would have been nice. I know plenty of folks who think MCSE is the only certification path available, and there's a Development team I know have been set an objective to gain MCSE on that basis - a big mistake! :)

To quote the article the following is planned;
SharePoint centric exams
70-488 Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Core Solutions (currently in beta, release expected in June 2013)
70-489 Developing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Advanced Solutions (currently in beta, release expected in June 2013)

Web development centric exams
70-480 Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3
70-486 Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications

If I had any complaints about the exams, they're very App centric. That's the model being pushed for us sure, but I have a feeling most of us will be doing a majority of on-premises development for the next few years (no matter how much O365 et al gets pushed), and that gets only a light touch in the skills measured. Shame, I felt like the 2010 exams were representative of the real world rather than the world the vendor wanted to push. *sigh*

Happy SharePointing!