I am not usually in the habit of giving Microsoft credit for things before the evidence is in. They have pulled enough bait-and-switches over the years to earn some healthy skepticism. But after watching the role-based Azure certification program roll out over the past few months, I will say it plainly: this is the right approach and it is working.
The core insight behind role-based certifications is simple. Employers do not hire an MCSE. They hire an Azure Administrator. They hire a Solutions Architect. They hire a Security Engineer. When a certification maps directly to a job title that appears in actual postings, its value to both the candidate and the hiring manager goes up significantly. You can look at the credential and immediately understand what the person can do. That is not a small thing.
The Azure Administrator Associate, which you earn by passing the AZ-103 exam (which replaced and consolidated the earlier AZ-100 and AZ-101 exams after some early adjustments to the track), validates that you can manage Azure subscriptions, implement storage solutions, deploy and manage virtual machines, configure networking, and handle identity and governance. That is a coherent job description. It maps to what an Azure admin actually does on a daily basis.
Compare that to the old MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure, which tested knowledge across a wide range of Microsoft technologies in a way that did not always translate cleanly to day-to-day job responsibilities. The role-based approach is more focused, more directly applicable, and more legible to people who are making hiring decisions.
The Fundamentals tier is also a genuinely good addition. The AZ-900 Azure Fundamentals exam gives people who are new to cloud a credential that says they understand cloud concepts at a baseline level without claiming expertise they do not have. I have seen organizations use it as a way to bring non-technical staff up to a common level of cloud literacy. It is not a career-making credential by itself, but it serves a real purpose in the certification ecosystem.
At the upper end, the Azure Solutions Architect Expert requires passing two separate exams covering design topics and is genuinely rigorous. It is not a credential you slide through. The exam content reflects the complexity of what enterprise architects actually face when designing large-scale Azure environments. That rigor is what will keep it valuable as it matures.
The full roadmap showing how all the role-based certifications connect is available at Microsoft Learn and it is worth spending twenty minutes with before you decide which track to pursue. The progression from Fundamentals through Associate to Expert is logical in a way that makes long-term career planning easier.
My advice heading into 2019: if you are an infrastructure professional who has been sitting on the fence about cloud certifications, the Azure Administrator Associate is a concrete, achievable, and marketable credential to aim for this year. The study materials have matured, the market is responding to it well, and the skills it validates are directly applicable in a large number of enterprise environments. Start there and build up the stack from that foundation.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.