Kaushal Shriyan wrote: > Can someone please help me understand recertification process?
First of all, LPI certifications don't expire – or at least they don't expire like some other certifications do, as in »the certification organisation will forget that you ever existed«. What does happen is that five years after you gained an LPI certificate, the status of that certificate in LPI's database is set to »inactive«. The reasoning behind this is that if LPI hasn't heard from you in five years, your Linux admin skills may have become a bit rusty (Linux being the moving target that it is). However, the fact that you did pass the certificate at some point will stay on record forever. (Both your certificate and your little LPIC card give the date of your certification, so if you're presenting a 2005-vintage certificate when applying for a job in 2014, your prospective employer may be less than impressed, but may still be more impressed than they would be if you had no certificate to show at all. Your employer *will* be able to check your certificate against LPI's alumni database, though, which would not work with certificates from various other vendors and their respective alumni databases.) You can prevent your certificate from becoming »inactive« by »re-certifying«, which means either re-taking (just) the exams that led to that certification, or else obtaining a higher-level certificate. Whenever you pass the appropriate exams to gain an LPI certificate, the five-year clock will start for that certificate and all active »lesser« LPI certificates that you hold. By way of example, let's assume Alice passed the LPI-101 and LPI-102 exams on 23 April, 2009, to gain her LPIC-1 certificate. That certificate will become inactive on 23 April, 2014, unless Alice either re-passes LPI-101 and LPI-102 or else passes LPI-201 and LPI-202 to gain an LPIC-2 certificate before that date. If Alice passes LPI-201 and LPI-202 on 21 April, 2014 then the clock will be started again for both her LPIC-1 and LPIC-2 certificates, and she will have to re-certify before 21 April, 2019, either by re-passing LPI-201 and LPI-202 or else passing any of the LPIC-3 speciality exams to gain an LPIC-3 certificate, at which time the clock will be restarted for her LPIC-2 and LPIC-1 exams too. (Note that Alice will NOT have to re-take LPI-101 and LPI-102 to re-certify at LPIC-2 level between 21 April 2014 and 21 April 2019.) It is a bit unclear (at least to me) what will happen with the LPIC-3 speciality exams. Presumably, given that there are no higher-level certifications you could take, you will have to re-certify by re-taking the exam in question. Maybe someone from LPI can clarify what the current policy is. Don't worry too much about the two-year thing. This is a recommendation based on the (debatable) assumption that either Linux or the LPI exams will have changed enough within two years that it would make sense to re-certify just to document that your Linux knowledge is very current indeed. My personal take is that regardless of what happens with Linux itself, it generally takes somewhat more than two years for the LPI exam objectives to be updated to account for any intervening important changes to Linux, and so if you want to be maximally up-to-date it would make sense to track new versions of the exams and re- certify either when there are actual interesting-looking changes to the exam objectives of your highest-level LPI certificate, or when 4 years and 11 months have elapsed since your last exam for that certificate, whichever occurs earlier. Finally, there has been some exploratory discussion regarding re-certification methods other than the re-taking of exams (which would be interesting at the LPIC-3 level in particular). This might include mentoring other LPIC candidates, taking part in discussions on LPI social networking sites, submitting records of relevant professional experience, or otherwise convincing LPI that you are still around and active. No concrete proposals have however been put forward as yet (that I am aware of). Anselm (Not speaking for my employer.) -- Anselm Lingnau ... Linup Front GmbH ... Linux-, Open-Source- & Netz-Schulungen anselm.ling...@linupfront.de, +49(0)6151-9067-103, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de Linup Front GmbH, Postfach 100121, 64201 Darmstadt, Germany Sitz: Weiterstadt (AG Darmstadt, HRB7705), Geschäftsführer: Oliver Michel _______________________________________________ lpi-discuss mailing list lpi-discuss@lpi.org http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss
