I’ve just refreshed or earned a bunch of new IT certifications in the past few months. Most of them I’d already gotten about a decade ago but they’d all expired or even if not expired were no longer relevant.

I passed seven exams in just over eight weeks. I have all day every day to study is why the prodigious pace. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. On average (though it’s hard to judge since I jump around a lot) I studied about 10 hours a day, seven days a week.

This post isn’t to brag – though I am proud – but to say that these certification exams are MUCH MUCH harder than when I took them in the early- to mid-2000s.

There are far more details, they are much more comprehensive, and they are far more fiddly and more specific in minute areas of IT knowledge, and so therefore as mentioned are much harder to pass.

In fact a few of these same certification exams I took in the 2000s I walked in having studied nothing and passed with near-perfect marks.

There is no chance I could do that today. Absolutely none. I would’ve failed miserably. I would’ve been able only to guess at a few questions.

So if you are thinking of taking any of the Cisco, Microsoft or even VMware certifications, you better really know your stuff or you will fail.

When I heard that these exams now had a 50%+ failure rate I didn’t believe it since I remembered how easy they’d been in the 2000s.

Well, I am glad I studied my ass off anyway because it turns out that some of the exams apparently in reality have an 80-90% failure rate now.

Each one costs $150 or more, so failing is not an option.

So as a warning if you took any of these class of exams more than five years ago, be aware that they are not the cakewalk they used to be. One of them was the hardest exam I’ve ever taken anywhere.

(I’m prevented by NDA from being more specific; they can and will revoke my certifications if I reveal more details than I have in a public forum like this. Dumb rule? Yes. But nothing I can do about it.)