Pearson VUE to be primary Cisco certification exam partner 19 July, 2007 By Chris Talbot

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For its certification exams, Cisco has relied on two vendors, but the company has decided that dealing with one vendor is preferable.

"Essentially what we've done is we used two players before. Now we're using one," said Jeanne Beliveau-Dunn, senior director of Learning@Cisco at Cisco Systems. "The purpose of that is to be able to leverage the resources and essentially some key joint strategies together. It's hard if you're trying to do some very big thing and you need a vendor to work with you and make some strategic investments; it's hard to do that unless you make a big commitment to them. That's the reason we chose this strategy."

Beliveau-Dunn said Cisco wants to "raise the game," keep its certifications healthy and continue to keep the integrity of the exams with the right levels of security in place. To do this, it made sense to work with only one vendor for the exams.

Cisco also plans to make additional investments in its ability to turn certifications around quickly and expand its content, she said. The company also requires the ability to change over a test immediately if necessary, and she said that's easier to do with one vendor than with two.

"I think in general, it's just like anything else you do in business. When you decide to make some investments, you need a partner to do that," Beliveau-Dunn said.

One of the reasons Cisco gave for this change is improving test security. When asked if there were problems with exam security, Beliveau-Dunn assured eChannelLine that it hasn't been a big issue, but as Cisco continues to scale its certifications out around the globe, the company recognizes it may need to do things differently to maintain security, especially in regards to Internet-based testing.

"We need to make sure we have at least the same level of security with non-proctored exams as proctored exams," she said. Cisco simply wants to make sure that the person taking the exam is the right person to ensure the validity of the tests.

According to Beliveau-Dunn, making Pearson VUE the primary vendor for Cisco's certification exams shouldn't have much of an impact on partners.

"Most of our channel partners in the past have been using both [exam vendors.] The way the coverage model works is they have similar locations and reach amongst them. We think it's going to have minimal impact. It's just a matter of knowing what address to go to," Beliveau-Dunn said.