How to renew “MCSE:Business Intelligence” credentials

The other day a colleague of mine asked if I am preparing for a recertification exam for my “MCSE: Business Intelligence” certificate. His certificate was close to the expiration date and he wanted to see what resources I will be using.

That caught me by complete surprise! I totally forgot about the 3 year status of that certification. I quickly checking my profile at http://mcp.microsoft.com and there it was - my MCSE certificate was no longer active.

It turns out that Microsoft has tried to warn me, but I didn’t get those emails as they were going to an email account I don’t actively use.

At first I thought that since I missed the deadline my status has been cancelled and I would need to re-take all original exams in order to get it back. However, I decided to email Microsoft Support (certquest@microsoft.com) first and ask them about my options. Next day I received a response from them saying that my status hasn’t actually been cancelled, but was rather deactivated and that it will be re-activated as soon as I reconfirm my status by completing one of the two possible options:

• Option 1: Take re-certification exam 470
• Option 2: Recertify through Microsoft Virtual Academy

The second option required that I review and complete assessments for the following 9 MS Virtual Academy courses:

1. Database Fundamentals
2. Design and Implement Cloud Data Platform Solutions
3. Data Storage and Processing in the Cloud Demystified
4. Querying with Transact-SQL
5. Faster Insights to Data with Power BI Jump Start
6. Implementing a Data Warehouse with SQL Server Jump Start
7. Updating Your Database Management Skills to SQL Server 2014
8. Implementing Data Models & Reports with Microsoft SQL Server
9. Designing BI Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server

I chose the second option because I thought it would be a great refresher and also offered convenient free online access. It took me about 1 week to watch the videos and complete quick assessment. I really enjoyed the presentation and material (yes, you can skip forward on the videos). 

Once finished I emailed my certificate of completion to certquest@microsoft.com with a request to reactivate my status which was done 2 days after.

For details on Microsoft Virtual Academy see the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/recertification-virtual-academy.aspx