One of the most important jobs I ever had leading a multibillion-dollar customer experience organization was building one of the first and most widely adopted professional certification programs in the networking industry.
That’s less a bragging point—many outstanding people developed the skills-based programs that became a global industry model—and more a key lesson.
Certifications taught us how important services and support expertise were to the customer experience. The more technical skills our teams, customers, and our partners acquire around a technology, the more our customers can trust their investment in it—and the better their chance of realizing its full strategic value in today’s dynamic IT environments.
Don’t just take our word for it. The widening gap in IT skills is acknowledged by nearly every industry across the globe. A recent global study conducted by IDC found that nearly 39% of the businesses surveyed agreed that managing complex, multigenerational estates is a top barrier to achieving resiliency in their digital infrastructures.¹ That same study also underscored the importance of mentorship and training in managing these complex estates.
Invest in Your Technology and Your Talent with IT Professional Certifications
At Pure Storage®, we can stand behind saying that storage and data management are strategic because it’s how we engineered our tech from the ground up. From the data center to the cloud, to storage-as-code and modern analytics, storage isn’t a commodity. It’s strategic to your business—and so are the experts who manage it.
The storage managers and data architects of tomorrow will be those acquiring skills to manage multigenerational IT environments while driving digital transformation. That’s why today’s launch of nine new Pure Storage IT Professional Certifications—our biggest expansion in technical certifications to date—is so important for the storage industry.
These new Pure Storage IT Professional Certifications, delivered by Pure PEAK, will help more professionals and partners bring fresh storage and data management solutions to the myriad challenges of speed, scale, and security.
What’s in Store(age) for You
Pure Storage IT Professional Certifications cover any stage of a career, from new storage data center administrators and cloud and data management operators to seasoned architects. We’re bringing the widest selection of storage and data management certifications in the industry to give professionals the skills to tackle some of the biggest technology challenges today:
- Sustainable, performative data centers
- The cloud and stateless architectures
- Unstructured data
- Security
- Analytics and modern database services
With nine new examination paths and a redesign of the Pure Storage IT Professional Certifications program itself, Pure Storage now offers three levels of certification: Associate, Professional, and Specialist. Each addresses a different level of experience and domain expertise. We encourage our Pure Storage, customer, and partner technical professionals – anyone who works with Pure’s technology – to take part.
The PEAK Levels
- Pure Certified Data Storage Associate. This verifies the skills of administrators new to the field to perform operational tasks and administer Pure Storage FlashArray™, FlashBlade®, and other storage solutions. This certification will qualify associates to work in data center environments, manage hardware, or cover the Help Desk to resolve basic issues. Our first Associate level certification, the Certified Data Storage Associate, is available today.
- Pure Certified Professional. More experienced IT professionals can learn to install, configure, optimize, and troubleshoot Pure Storage and Portworx® by Pure Storage solutions. The Certified FlashArray Storage Professional and Certified FlashBlade Storage Professional join the recently launched Certified Portworx Enterprise Professional certification and are all available today.
- Pure Storage Architect Professional. These certifications are further along the path and will be launched later this year. They’re for experienced IT professionals and architects who design, build, and manage systems with Pure Storage products, including full Kubernetes storage solutions for cloud native architectures (Portworx).
- Pure Certified Specialist. This certification helps technical teams build specialist expertise on complex and critical technical challenges, such as data protection and recovery, cloud storage, app-aware container storage for DevOps teams, and file and object storage for massive analytics and AI use cases, and more. FlashArray Implementation Specialist, FlashBlade Implementation Specialist, and Cloud Block Store Specialist are now available, with more coming soon.
Confidence You Can Take with You
We also redesigned the entire certification program to ensure quality, consistency, and continuous learning. Technical associates will receive exclusive badges, with clear certification validity timelines (three years), and new recertification policies for continuous education. And, to measure and improve training, we’ll follow the data, taking pass rates, job changes, training, and certification CSAT scores and more into account.
This will help Pure Storage Certified IT Professionals gain both a breadth and depth of knowledge about Pure Storage products, including FlashArray, FlashBlade, and Portworx.
We aim to build the best support and services experience in the storage industry. That means a certification in Pure Storage expertise will carry weight wherever our professionals take them.
With Pure Storage technology and our training and certifications, you’ll not only grow your role, you’ll grow your capital. We invite you to gain the knowledge and differentiated expertise to inspire your stakeholders and deliver better outcomes for your business—and to take yourself and the industry firmly into strategic territory.
Want to be part of the most innovative certified storage and data management team on the planet? Learn more and get started with us at Pure Storage IT Professional Certifications.
¹“Bridging the IT Infrastructure Skills Gap by Hiring Outside the Box.” IDC, June, 2022. (Reference: IDC #US49241522)
