Elastic Certification: The Next Step in Your Elasticsearch Training Journey

Elastic engineers have had the privilege to meet and train thousands of people in the community over the years. One piece of feedback we’ve frequently received is that Elastic users would love to show the world their Elasticsearch expertise by earning an industry-recognized certification. Well, we heard you loud and clear and are excited to announce that you will soon be able to earn your first official Elastic certification and become an Elastic Certified Engineer.

As an Elastic Certified Engineer, you will be able to grow professional opportunities for both you and your company. The badge you’ll be able to display on LinkedIn (or the line that you’ll add to your CV) will show all future employers, partners, and customers that you not only know what Elasticsearch is, but that you are verified expert that can develop, deploy, and manage powerful search and analytics solutions. And importantly, your expertise is backed by the most reputable source for all things Elastic (us).

So how do we verify you’re an expert? We have designed a performance-based exam that tests your knowledge of Elasticsearch in addition to your ability to apply that knowledge in hands-on, real-world situations in real time. An Elastic Certified Engineer can deploy a cluster, write precise queries and complex aggregations, create optimized mappings with custom analyzers, manage shard allocation as ingest increases, troubleshoot node issues, and more.

To prepare you for this new certification, we are launching two new training courses — Elasticsearch Engineer I and Elasticsearch Engineer II — both of which are now available from our course catalog. These instructor-led courses, offered both in-class or in a virtual classroom, are designed to equip students with the knowledge and hands-on experience to be successful in the real world with Elasticsearch, as well as to prepare them to attempt the certification exam. Both of these classes will start being taught in April, but we recommend signing up for them now as seats are limited. If you have an Elastic Online Annual Training Subscription, you will see that these offerings have already been added to your list of courses.

We’ve centered Elasticsearch Engineer I and Elasticsearch Engineer II on concepts that we believe are critical for anyone who uses Elasticsearch, regardless of job title. Whether you’re a developer, a system admin, or in a hybrid role somewhere in-between, we believe that there is a fundamental core of Elasticsearch knowledge and experience you should have. These new courses concentrate this knowledge and hands-on experience into a simple learning path that is rigorous but achievable while maintaining the integrity of what it means to be an Elastic Certified Engineer.

With the release of this new certification path, we will soon be retiring Elasticsearch Developer I, Elasticsearch Developer II, and Elasticsearch Operations I. We’ve pulled a lot of pertinent information from these three classes to develop Elasticsearch Engineer I and II, and in doing so, have streamlined the process for preparing for certification. If you have already taken any of the retiring classes, good news, you’re already well on your way to getting certified and likely only need to take one more class in preparation. If you’ve already taken all three, better news, you’re ready. We want to make this curriculum transition as easy as possible, so we’ve created a Certification FAQ that explains next steps for current students. Additionally, if you have any questions about where you are on the certification path, you can contact the Training Operations and Certification teams directly.

Finally, you may be wondering if consolidating three classes into two leaves some vital knowledge and hands-on experience on the cutting room floor. Yes and no. Elastic Certified Engineers are experts on core Elastic functionality, not use case specific knowledge. Use case specific knowledge will be moved into specializations, which will be released later in the year. These specializations will include future training courses and certificates that go deep into specific Elastic solutions like logging, app search, security analytics, APM and more. No knowledge is being lost, it’s just being better organized.

We hope this new approach to training will help the community not only quickly become experts, but also help them demonstrate to the world they are the right person for the job. We hope to see you in a classroom soon!