According to Donna Senko, group manager of certification and skills assessment at Microsoft Corp., this number has doubled from the 15,000 reported at the beginning of this year by the independent Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine .
Money is one reason.
Employers are recognizing MCSE competence. Supervisors rated MCSEs as more capable than comparable noncertified systems engineers on certain tasks, such as hardware installation and maintenance, in a 1995 evaluation conducted by the Applied Experimental Psychology Group at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Of the MCSEs surveyed, more than 90 percent said the certification was useful to the work they did in IS planning, maintenance of IS, software support and consultation, and network administration. Even after you earn your MCSE, you can't rest on your laurels. The certification program and its exams are constantly re-evaluated to ensure accurate measurement of knowledge about current technology, and this sometimes leads to new tests that even certified MCSEs must pass to maintain their credentials.