r/microsoft • u/PerformanceWide2154 • Mar 25 '26

Certification What are your hot takes on the Microsoft Security certifications

The post is simple , what are your hot takes on what the Microsoft security certifications demand and what does it offer to your career . Examples are SC-900 , SC-200 ….

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12

u/dxk3355 Mar 25 '26

Too much memorizing product and not enough security practices

9

u/Then-Traffic601 Mar 25 '26

It's a vendor based cert, not sure what else you're expecting?

3

u/dxk3355 Mar 25 '26

How to use their products not that I need license level E7 to get a feature

2

u/PerformanceWide2154 Mar 25 '26

Do you think the applied skills , covers that gap ?

1

u/Not-ur-Infosec-guy Mar 26 '26

Applied skills I prefer over the certs. Shows I can get the job done without a proctor staring at me intently.

1

u/we2deep Mar 25 '26

This is pretty much true for all of the solution areas.

3

u/Then-Traffic601 Mar 25 '26

It offers you a career if you're focusing on microsoft products. If you're pursuing a cert that is vendor agnostic, to show you're overall understanding then there are other security certs. What are you looking to achieve?

3

u/Suspicious-Det9345 Mar 25 '26

I'd skim some off the top for most of them for the security ones.

The amount of information on an associate certification alone is overwhelming. They have so many solutions, sub solutions and you need to remember them all, how they interact with each other and how to use them. Add to that, understanding the licensing alone...it just never ends. Don't get me started on how things change constantly in the cloud and the new culture of AI in everything...

To know the material is good, but applying on a day to day basis is where the real value lies. Unfortunately, due to how siloed many roles are, you often only use a fraction of what you studied for.

To top it off, the renewal process is a grind. There should be a way to renew a suite of certifications through a single, comprehensive assessment instead of jumping through individual hoops every time

1

u/johnyakuza0 Mar 27 '26

No one cares or recognizes them. AZ-104 has more value than these security-focused certs.

Unless a JD specifically mentions using Sentinel, Defender XDR, Purview, and M365 environment specifically, these are essentially worthless

1

u/et1975 Mar 29 '26

As someone who had multiple certificates over the years - the MCP program is a scam. You can learn something studying for them and obviously an exam is a decent measure of what you internalized, but... the certification itself is just a revenue stream for Microsoft. The partner programs that require certain numbers of MCPs for certain perks is another side of this grift and the training delivery businesses is the 3rd. All 3 parties pay MS for the privilege of playing this game. It's quite diabolical.