Chances are that, at some point in your career, you have taken an exam for a certification to give yourself a competitive advantage. Whether attaining certification was a personal goal, a way to make yourself more marketable, or you simply like seeing all the fancy acronyms in your email signature that ends up looking like your cat walked across your keyboard, earning certifications is a way to illustrate the depth and breadth of your knowledge and expertise.
Attaining certification takes time and effort. Take a moment and think back to all the times that you have taken a certification exam. Were there times that you came away thinking that the exam required too many questions that only tested your ability to navigate a GUI? Or that you had to answer a question that tests some obscure option to a command that you’ll likely never use or need and can be found with a simple Google search? You may have also encountered questions where you thought, “That isn’t very clear. I could write that so much better.”
To continually improve our exams, VMware is forming an international community of subject matter experts (i.e. Certification SME) to help design, write and set standards for all VMware exams. The Certification SME is an expert in as many as four exam tracks:
- Data Center Virtualization
- Cloud Management and Automation
- Desktop and Mobility
- Network Virtualization
As a VMware Certification SME, you will contribute your skills and field experience to create technically viable and psychometrically sound exams that reflect current industry software and practices. VMware Certification SMEs will be called upon to perform one or more of the following tasks:
- Attend an in-person or remote job task analysis workshop where you will collaborate with other industry experts to determine the topics that a test candidate must know to be minimally qualified.
- Participate in a remote item writing workshop where you will write test questions and real-world scenarios for a specified exam track and, in collaboration with other industry experts, perform a technical review to produce questions that appeal to audiences world-wide.
- Set the exam pass score. In this remote workshop, you will participate in a number of exercises that will determine the score required for a test candidate to pass the exam and be considered minimally qualified.
- Perform a health check on an exam to ensure that the questions and technologies contained within the exam are still current and relevant.
These workshops are a great way to connect with like-minded experts, expand your network, and collaborate and learn from other professionals in your area of expertise. You become a critical part of the effort to create well-respected IT industry exams.
For your exam development contributions, your certification transcript will be credited for the exam that you helped to develop, helping you earn that certification (once you have met all the other certification requirements, if any.) You will also receive a VMware Certification Contributor digital badge that can be posted on your LinkedIn profile as a way to recognize your contributions.
Click here if you would like to become a VMware Certification SME.
