Rebranded Professional Google Workspace Administrator certification

[AndrewB]

I saw this on the blog this morning. Personally, I never understood why it wasn't called this in the first place. 😜 

Curious how many here are certified? What are your thoughts?

@KAM @icrew @kim_nilsson @stevelarsen @brian_kim @dominik @CalebSpring @Jan-Carlos @StephenHind 

[brian_kim]

The term "engineer" is protected in some jurisdictions so it makes sense to me. My sister who is an actual engineer always gave me trouble and I told them to take it up with Google. Perhaps she did 😁

[dominik]

If it were called the way it is now called back when it launched in would have been called "Professional G Suite Administrator" and the marketing team at Google wouldn't have had the fun of re-naming the certificate right now lol 😂

[Jan-Carlos]

Yeah, I have this certification. 
Personally, the Professional Collaboration Engineer sounds way better haha

[HighTideMark]

belated congrats, Jan-Carlos!

Are you currently using your certificate?  moreso, is it tied to any other org or are you a certified GWS Admin "free agent"?  I'm looking for 2 certified GWS Admin wizards to join the team - let me know if you might be interested!

[dominik]

The worst part about this that i used to be an engineer for only 3 years in total...welp back to just being an Admin lol 

[kim_nilsson]

I too have this certification.

I thought it was a good test with relevant questions. 

[CalebSpring]

I don't have the certificate which is why I ask all the questions to the smart people in this community 🤣

[icrew]

I was certified ages ago, but I let it lapse for 2 reasons:

• I thought that they were going to remind me when it expired, but they never did, so I simply forgot.
• I don't do all that much hands on touching of the admin console anymore (I'm doing more architectural/continual service improvement across our fleet of SaaS collaborative services these days). 

One piece of feedback:

A colleague recently (last month) considered getting this certification, but ultimately decided not to pursue it. She didn't move forward with signing up/paying for the test because there's really nothing available about what's on the exam/how to prepare to take and pass it. For example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcYbUuAVUPw gave an overview of the long-outdated Google Apps Admin Certification Exam. There's nothing like that available anyplace anymore.

[AndrewB]

That's good feedback @magdaj @carrie 

[Jan-Carlos]

@icrew , 

If her company has access to the partner advantage portal, there are some training for admins.

Next month it will be added the "professional collaboration engineer kickstart"

Which you have to do some qwik labs courses, and Google will give you a free voucher to the certification after finish the track.

Hope it helps.

[icrew]

Thanks @Jan-Carlos -- I don't think we have that access, as we're just a Workspace for Education Plus customer. (Greetings from the University of California, Berkeley!) 

[saralerner]

Based on your feedback, we created this video to help folks prepare for this certification. Check it out and let us know what you think! 

[brian_kim]

https://github.com/sathishvj/awesome-gcp-certifications/blob/master/professional-collaboration-engin... this may be out of date, but good resource on all google certifications.

[icrew]

Thanks! We both looked for ages and didn't find that.

[stevelarsen]

There are over 2,040 that have been certified. You can see the Series ID of the most recent person that published their cert here.

I was the 20th person to get this new version of the certification.

[StephenHind]

@AndrewB there was already a separate and much simpler G Suite Administrator qualification at the time, hence why it was not called that. I truly believe that renaming the qualification to this new name will cause confusion with the old qualification and devalue it.

I was one of the original beta testers for the qualification and got certified then: the certification elapsed 18 or 24 months after that (I can't remember which) and I didn't bother recertifying at the time as, is usual with, the Google Partner Program said it didn't count towards our partner certifications so there was no real point in me recertifying.  After the certification elapsed I found that the Google Partner Program moved the goalposts, YET AGAIN, and then stated that it would count as certification towards our partner status.

One of the focusses of the certificate is migration and getting Workspace working for the first time, hence why it was particularly relevant for partners, and it's very in-depth, so overall I'm a bit disappointed about the miscommunication resulting in bad choices made.