February 2005

An Updated Look at CIW Certifications

by Emmett Dulaney

Last month, I covered the newly updated CIW Foundations exam. Taken alone, this exam earns you certification as a CIW Associate, but it is also the cornerstone exam upon which almost all other CIW certifications are built — you must pass it in order to obtain almost any other CIW certification.

This month, I'll take an updated look at the other certification offerings from CIW, and what the requirements are for each of the vendor-neutral, Internet-related certifications they currently offer.

All exams are offered through both Prometric and VUE testing centers, and most are priced at $125 (there are a few deviations). In addition to the exams, CIW also creates training material (their primary purpose, you might say), and all exam questions are pulled from courseware. That does not mean that you have to sit through the training classes and read the courseware to learn what is on the exams, but it certainly helps. (An alternative is to look for training material, such as study guides in the bookstore, that have been approved by CIW.)

There are eight certifications now available, and they are as follows:

CIW Associate

This is the cornerstone certification required for almost everything else. To obtain it, you must pass one exam — CIW Foundations (1D0-510), which consists of 85 questions. There are three subject areas that it focuses upon:

1. Internet Business Foundations
2. Site Development Foundations
3. Networking Technology

I discussed this exam