Newbie to exams, looking for advise on company progression

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone can guide me in the right direction.

I've been working on a Tier 1 / Service Desk role for just over 2 years now for a large Manged Hosting company, and I'm really wanting to progress on the Windows side of things.

I started studying for the 70-640, but I stopped due to home issues. From September I'll be free and ready to study to get my first exam behind my belt!

The thing is, the Tier 2 role that is the next step on progression does not include hardly any AD troubleshooting, so I do not think it will be beneficial for me in the short term to complete this, would you recommend me going straight into the 70-646? As from reading into this, it seems this will suit the job role further, but I've read that you should really do 640/642 first. (Or any other exam you would think that would be good to start with?)
I'm not sure what everyone else thinks, but it seems to me on 2008 the learning structure is not very newbie friendly compared to the 2012 set up (MCSA: Windows Server 2012 Certification).
I really like that they have an exam for Installing Configuring > Admin > Advanced.

At current I do very very basic server tasks, but I do have a good understanding how most of the systems work and I own a HP MicroServer which I've been playing round with ESXi on.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

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Lucas21

I can't give you much advice since I'm also studying for the 70-640. But what I just found out after clicking the link in your post is that if I did get MCITP:SA in the next few months, I won't be able to upgrade. That's quite surprising to me given many other certifications are upgradable.

xbuzz

Lucas21 wrote: »

I can't give you much advice since I'm also studying for the 70-640. But what I just found out after clicking the link in your post is that if I did get MCITP:SA in the next few months, I won't be able to upgrade. That's quite surprising to me given many other certifications are upgradable.

Not qualified to answer you either jogon sorry, but in regard to Lucas. Next year when Server 2012 comes out, they are basically renaming MCITP:SA to MCSA 2008, so if you do MCITP:SA now you will be able to upgrade to MCSA 2012 next year with 1 exam. The reason they are renaming MCITP is to keep consistency within the names, so you can just think of MCITP:SA = MCSA 2008.

Lucas21

Thanks for the clarification xbuzz. I'm less apprehensive about going for the MCITP:SA now.

jogon

How is your studying going for the 640? Do you think you'll manage all 3 exams by July next year?

- Also bump, if anyone can answer my query

MentholMoose

Welcome to the forums. 646 covers the topics from 640/642 at a higher level... e.g. there will be questions on how to design some solution, rather than which check box to tick in some wizard. I think 646 will be very difficult if you don't know the stuff in 640 and 642. Also, passing 646 by itself won't give you any cert at all which won't be useful for the resume. 640 or 642 will at least give you an MCTS.

This page shows the requirements for all of the MCITP certs:
MCITP (Microsoft Certified IT Professional) | Training Courses for IT Professionals

You can click on the link for each exam to get more details. Generally it is recommended to take the "TS" exams before the "Pro" exam for a particular MCITP cert, and to take the exams in numerical order (e.g. 640 -> 642 -> 646 for MCITP: SA). In some cases this is debatable, for example, some people say the 642 is easier than 640 and thus should be taken first. I think this varies by the individual test taker. For example, when I did the SA, I already had good AD experience, so taking 640 first went fine.

ptilsen

Just to clarify, 640, 642, and 646 themselves aren't retiring next year -- just the title MCITP:SA, which isn't really that big of a deal. The only tests that more or less need to be passed by then are 643 and 647 for anyone still pursuing an EA.

I would study them "in order", more or less. The 646 exam builds on some of the material from 642 and 640. Studying it first certainly won't help with either 640 or 642, so there's no advantage to going out of order.