Red Hat Certification Guide

 These certifications can help you get ahead in your IT career.

Red Hat Inc. provides open source software solutions to more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies, including internet service providers, airlines, healthcare companies and commercial banks. The company has been around for more than two decades and is well known for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. Red Hat provides a fully open technology stack, which you can alter to suit your needs – you're not locked into the vendor's vision of the software or stack components. Red Hat's portfolio of products and services also include JBoss middleware, cross-platform virtualization, cloud computing (CloudForms and OpenStack) and much more. 

Red Hat offers numerous professional certifications based on its software products, including operating systems, virtualization, storage and cloud-based solutions. 

Red Hat certification program overview

The Red Hat certification program aims at system administrators, engineers, architects, enterprise developers, and application administrators, as well as cloud and virtualization administrators, who use RHEL in their IT infrastructures. The certification program aims to ensure that candidates are proficient in RHEL by requiring them to pass performance-based certification exams. Whereas many certification exams ask multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank questions about specific technologies, Red Hat requires you to perform and complete real-world tasks using Red Hat technologies to pass its exams. 

Red Hat traditionally offered certification exams only upon completion of a training course. Now you can take a Red Hat exam on your own schedule, outside of training, if you like. Each exam session is performed on a secured system in a professionally proctored testing center. These centers are located in select cities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. 

Once you earn a Red Hat certification, you become a Red Hat Certified Professional. This gives you access to Red Hat Certification Central, which allows you to connect with potential employers, join the Red Hat community, create study groups and collaborate on projects. In addition, you can explore Red Hat's training options and easily schedule individual exam sessions. Discounts on recertification exams are offered there as well.