Zev

When you go to take an IT certification exam, you are entering a controlled environment that is the testing center site. The testing center ensures your identification and provides a secure and comfortably optimal environment, that promotes your best ability to showcase your talent and deep knowledge of the subject matter. The utter reality is that site guidelines have enough leeway to allow testing centers to differ widely in their implementation of operational procedures. Some are closer to the pristine meccas of scientific measurement one would hope for, while others tend to be no better and perhaps worse than your average high school. Before you choose a testing center, before you take the expensive test, do not waste your money’s worth and valuable time spent studying, go to the testing center and scope it out.

Two companies have emerged as the primary providers of testing centers: Prometric and Pearson Vue. The main conundrum is that each company has exclusive rights to certain tests. In academia, Prometric offers the Graduate Records Examination (GRE) for graduate students, but you would go to Pearson Vue for the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) if you were seeking an Masters of Business Administration (MBA). In the IT domain, technology companies also choose one or the other for their tests. If you are getting certified for Microsoft, Apple, or IBM, you would be testing with Prometric. For CISCO, Orcale, VMWare, or Zend, you would have to find a Pearson Vue testing center. While you do not have a choice of which testing company to go to for certain tests, depending on your proximity to urban centers, you do have a choice of testing facilities.

Looking deeper, one finds that testing centers are owned and operated as if a franchisee of either company. This means that practically anyone can open a testing center anywhere that fits the minimum requirements for a testing center. If you look at the Prometric testing facility application, a center must meet several requirements on physical and technical merits. The Pearson Vue testing center application, lists similar guidelines. Allowing considerable tolerances supplies vastly different experiences at each location. Because of the wide variances of each facility, it is best to visit each testing center before choosing the one that you feel will, well, facilitate your best efforts to showcase your hard-earned knowledge instead of being hampered by a sub-par testing center.

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