Renewing your Microsoft Certifications - for free!

Isaac Stephens, 17 May 2021

Sitting Microsoft Exams is a great way to prove your skills and gain ‘Certifications’. These Certification are now only valid for 1 year after a recent change by Microsoft. However, if you are sitting a Fundamentals exam these currently do not have an expiry date. As you can see below, I have the Power Platforms Fundamentals and the Power Platform Developer, the first has no expiry and the later has a 2-year expiry (This is because I sat the exam last year before the 1 year expiry update). Microsoft updated these expiries to ensure everyone is up to speed with their Certification, this is extremely important with the Power Platform as Microsoft are releasing updates every 6 Months! So by the time my Power Platform Developer has expired there will have been 4 releases with the new 1 year expiry only 2 releases would have been.

Originally for all Certifications you would have to re-sit all the exams again, paying the same amount as it was the first time around. This can be quite costly, especially if you have gained multiple certifications. So now Microsoft have come out with a new option called “Renew this Certification”, this is a free - at home - skills test to confirm you are still up to speed on the content of your certification. This also means that if your Certification required 2+ exams to get, you will save even more time and money as you’ll only sit one assessment! This will extend it by one year but it can be renewed each year after that too! Currently this is only limited to Certifications that have been ‘on the market’ for at least 6 months. The current list (March 2021) can be found here.

I currently have my Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Sales Functional Consultant Associate certificate up for renewal, as you can see it actually expires in October but Microsoft are being kind and giving us a 6-month heads up so we can study and pass the renewal before our Certification expires! The actual assessment happens on Learn so you will need to connect your Learn and Certification accounts if you have not already done so.

And once that has been connected you should see the banner update to say this:

Another great thing around this Certification Renewal is that you can fail it and try again. Microsoft gives you unlimited attempts up until your Certification expires but you will have to wait 24 hours after your second attempt and each attempt after that. If you do fail, don’t panic, just take that 24-hour rest period to study!

Speaking of study, as this is happening with Microsoft Learn they have curated some Modules that will help you, for my Sales Functional Consultant Certification there are 4 modules as shown in the image below. These modules will give you the best chance of passing your exam so you probably should take the time to go through them before sitting your first attempt. Another reason you should study is because these modules aren’t necessarily going to be the content your previously studied for in the original exams. As you can see the topics in my four modules are around Customer Insights and Sales Insights which were not key areas assessed in the MB-200 and Sales exams.

So now go check your Certification Dashboard, you might just find you have a Certification to renew, good luck!