Phew! I’ve just read an e-mail from Red Hat informing me that I passed the Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) exam that I took this morning.

The confidentiality agreement that I had to sign makes it practically impossible for me to talk about my exam experience but Red Hat’s RHCT exam preparation guide gives the most important details and without giving away any of the specifics, I can confirm that it was one of the most challenging certification exams I’ve ever taken (which is good, because having passed actually means something).

Apart from living and breathing Linux for the last few days, my preparation consisted of attending an RH033 course last year (including the now-discontinued RH035 Windows conversion course – my own quick introduction to Linux for Windows administrators may be useful as a substitute) and spending this week on an RH133 course (which includes the RH202 practical exam); I also have some limited experience from running Linux on some of my own computers and I worked on various Unix systems at Uni in the early 1990s. In short, I’m a competent technician (as the certification title indicates) but not a Linux expert.

As for my next steps, the Novell and Microsoft Interop Ability partnership directly impacts upon my work, so I imagine that any further work I do with Linux will be related to Novell (SUSE) Enterprise Linux. Even so, RHCT is a well-respected qualification, which is why I wanted to gain that certification (especially after setting off down that path last year). It’s unlikely that I’ll gain the necessary experience to go forward to attempt Red Cat Certified Engineer (RHCE) or Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) status (at least not in my day job) but I may convert to Novell’s Certified Linux Professional (CLP)/Certified Linux Engineer (CLE) path at a later date. In the meantime, it’s about time that I updated my Microsoft credentials…