Exam Profiles page header at PearsonITCertification.com

If there’s a certification exam in your future, you might want to visit the Exam Profiles page at the PearsonITCertification.com Website. Right now, I count profiles for 14 Cisco exams, 3 CompTIA exams (A+, Network+, and Security+, natch), 13 Microsoft exams, and the PMI’s PMP and the ITIL V3 Foundation exams as well. That’s a lot of useful and valuable intelligence that you can grab to help you prepare with just a few mouse clicks.

Profiles are prepared by veteran certification authors immediately after taking the exams they cover. [Note: these authors and PearsonITCertification.com abide completely by the exam agreements from sponsoring organizations, so you won't find any brain dumps or question details here, but there is still lots of worthwhile information to peruse.] Information provided includes the following:

• An overview of the exam’s coverage and content.
• Exam details to describe the examination itself, including number and type of questions, cut scores, time limits, and registration info and links.
• A litany of potential “Trouble Spots” where candidates should bone up and prepare for challenging questions, and even the occasional curve ball.
• Preparation Hints: An overview of exam coverage with pointers to study resources (books, mostly).
• Exam Objectives: reproduced verbatim from the sponsor’s materials if permission to reproduce is granted; paraphrased if not.
• Where to go from here: recommendations for a next or follow-on exam for those who take and pass the exam being profiled.

This stuff is definitely worth a visit, if you’re heading for a testing center for any of the sponsors or exams mentioned in the lead paragraph for this blog post. I hope you find these materials worthwhile, and hope you’ll share your feedback and comments on them with me, as you dig into them for yourself.