Ubuntu Certified Professional

Whatever Mark Shuttleworth does, he does in style.
So when Canonical started Ubuntu Certified Professional ( UCP ) courses in partnership with Linux Professional Institute (LPI), it became an instant media craze;
for this was unique in many ways.

From Ubuntu website
"The Ubuntu Certified Professional is a training certification based on the LPI level 1 certification. To earn the UPC, candidates are required to pass the LPI 101, LPI 102 and the Ubuntu (LPI 199) exams."

Now similar certificate programs are already offered by Novell and RedHat , however, those two do not partner with LPI. Association with LPI automatically means that a UCP would have already cleared industry standard LPI courses and would specialize in Ubuntu.

If we check the course objectives and details,

The courses are designed for System Administrator levels and tests the candidate's ability to:

• Perform easy maintenance tasks: help out users, add users to a larger system, backup & restore, shutdown & reboot
• Install and configure a workstation (including X) and connect it to a LAN, or a stand-alone PC via modem to the Internet.
• Work with the Linux command line.

Ubuntu offers two courses:

1. Basic Ubuntu usage, command line, package management etc
2. This is an advanced level course comprising of

1. The kernel - managing kernel modules, reconfiguring, building and installing a custom kernel and more

2. Printing - managing printers and print queues locally and remote

3. Documentation

4. Shells, scripting, programming & compiling

5. Administrative tasks

6. Networking fundamentals

7. Networking services

8. Security

Now this course does offer some depth in Linux knowledge. Further details of the course is available at Ubuntu web site.

Canonical did not stop at simply announcing the courses, they made sure that the courses are easily available at all the places. For this Canonical has formed partnership with major Linux training providers in different parts of world.
To name a few

• Trai Cen,
  
• LynuxTraining Sàrl,
• NT+C Network Training and Consulting, and the latest
  
• Altkom

They went a step further and formed a partnership with Thomson Prometric and Person VUE and the Ubuntu Certified Professional exam is now available worldwide at over 7,000 Thomson Prometric and Pearson VUE testing centres.
This expanded the reach of UCP exam and made it very easy for perspective students to appear for it.

With these steps, Ubuntu sure appears poised to make its place in the exponentially growing Linux server market.