CHANGES TO LPIC-2 AND LPIC-3 CERTIFICATION PROGRAMMS

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), a Linux certification organization, is making changes to its LPIC-2 and LPIC-3 certification programs.
The new objectives for these certifications are presently under development. New exams will be available in English on October 1, 2013 with local translations and pricing to be announced. The Linux Professional Institute is globally supported by the IT industry, enterprise customers, community professionals, government entities and the educational community.
 LPI's major financial sponsors are platinum sponsors IBM, Linux Journal, Linux Magazine, Novell, SGI, and TurboLinux as well as gold sponsors, HP and IDG. According to the LPI, it is concentrating on essential and advanced system administration skills in LPIC-2, while further focusing the LPIC-3 program on specific specialties such as mixed environments, security, and high availability/virtualization.
 The upcoming changes also reflect LPI's work with the larger open source community in to ascertain the skill sets necessary for various specialized job roles for Linux professionals.


 A revised program roadmap and a description of proposed changes to the LPIC-2 and LPIC-3 certification program can be found here. The LPIC-3 programme, and the 301 (Core) and 302 (Mixed Environments) exams, are now at/past their five (5) year age and there has been repeated sentiments from the field to update and redress some issues now that we have had some experience with LPIC-3.
 The main issues presented have been that: The 301 Core exam is an impediment to candidates wishing to achieve the 303 (Security) and 304 (HA/Virtualization) credentials.
 With the pending mainstream release of Samba 4, the services covered by the OpenLDAP (301 exam) and Samba (302 exam) will have significant overlap.
 It is time to update the 301/302 exam objectives. Capacity Planning is better tested in LPIC-2 as it is core to all service scaling. Other technologies that cover the problem domain of the 301 and 302 exams exist and are maturing. Proposed Changes Exam Content Refactoring The main points of this refactoring are: Move Capacity Planning and OpenLDAP server essentials (not everything) to LPIC-2 Merge remaining 301/302 topics into a 300 exam Add Samba4, Kerberos, FreeIPA to the 300 exam Further additions to be considered are OAuth2, OpenID and FreeRADIUS coverage.
 Also, pending changes will be addressed which are listed here. Certification Requirements With the refactoring of content for the LPIC-2 and LPI-300 exam, there will no longer be a requirement for obtaining an LPIC-3 certification beyond the individual level 3 exam.
 For example, in order to get the LPIC-3 Security certification a candidate would require an ACTIVE LPIC-2 certification and the LPI-303 exam.
 Major Milestones Commence reassessment of LPIC-2 objectives as described above with a target release of Spring 2013 for new exams. Publication of the new LPI-300 exam (based on new objectives) will be available in the Summer of 2013 Existing LPI-301 and LPI-302 exams will be available until the end of 2013 Existing holders of LPIC-3 certification (or the LPI-302 specialty) will continue to have their certifications remain "active" as per LPI's recertification policy (#6 in policies). Programme Roadmap This following image represents the roadmap for certification with the new LPI-300 exam.