Announcing: Plesk Obsidian Professional and University Certification Upgrades

Announcing: Plesk Obsidian Professional and University Certification Upgrades

Plesk is glad to announce that the Plesk Obsidian Professional course and exam are now available for you to take. We’re also working hard on updating our other courses and exams to completely align with Plesk Obsidian as well. Then, the plan is to complete the full line-up: Associate, Professional, and Expert, by the end of the year.

Getting your certification and digital badge

To earn a brand-new Plesk Obsidian Professional certificate and digital badge, simply:

  1. Go to Plesk University and log in
  2. Complete the Plesk Obsidian Professional course
  3. Take the Plesk Obsidian Professional Certification exam online.

However, we understand that some of our students have already earned their certificates recently. So it may be a bit unfair to ask you to re-do a course in this case. Especially if you’ve already spent time earning or renewing your certification just months before the new Plesk Obsidian course was released.

So what’s the point of having a brand new certificate for the previous version of the product, Plesk Onyx? Do you have to do it all over again? And how do you do it, if only one new exam is available at the moment? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back!

Plesk University Certification Upgrades

Completed the Plesk Obsidian: What’s new? course and passed the Plesk Certification Upgrade to Obsidian exam? Then, all your Plesk Onyx certifications earned between June 1, 2019 and October 16, 2019 will be upgraded to Plesk Obsidian.

For example, maybe you earned your certificates for Plesk Onyx Associate in May, Plesk Onyx Professional in June, and Plesk Onyx for Linux Expert in September. If you pass the Plesk Obsidian Certification Upgrade exam, you’ll earn the Plesk Obsidian Professional and Plesk Obsidian for Linux Expert certificates right away.

The certification upgrade program will be active until the end of 2019, when the full line-up of Plesk Obsidian courses becomes available.

 

Learn more about Free Plesk University Certifications here.

Get Your Plesk Obsidian Quiz Score | 5 Minutes

Get Your Plesk Obsidian Score - Plesk

You might have heard what’s been going on at Plesk. The new Obsidian release has taken us all by storm with a world of new features, extensions and updates. But how much do you really know about Plesk Obsidian and its enhanced security, usability and productivity features? Get your score from the official Plesk Obsidian Quiz below and find out.

The New Plesk Obsidian Quiz

Do you accept this challenge? Then here are the easy steps to follow in order to complete the Plesk Obsidian Quiz.

  1. Choose the best answer/s in each of the following 11 questions. It will take you less than 5 minutes, and remember – no cheating!
  2. After the final question, click “Get Score” in order to get your instant Plesk Obsidian Quiz score and see how you did.
  3. Share your score and this quiz with your peers by using the social media buttons at the end of this post.
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Improving your Plesk Obsidian Quiz Score & Know-how

Finally let us know how you did in the comments below or on Twitter or Facebook. Think you can do better? Fortunately, to address your questions and help you navigate Plesk Obsidian better, we have educational courses inside Plesk University.

If you’re not registered yet, click the button below and take a minute to sign up. Then click on “Get this Course” and complete it for your very own Plesk Obsidian certificate.

Take the Obsidian Course

* For more info on how to register, where to find courses and how to pass exams, you can consult the Plesk University guide for Pleskians. And if you didn’t find what you were looking for, you can always drop us a line in our idea box.

How to become a Plesk Support Engineer

So, you applied to become a Plesk Support Engineer and after a series of interviews and negotiations, you signed the contract. Congrats! You’ve just become a part of an effective and successful team. You’ll spend the first five weeks going through an intensive technical onboarding process full of lessons, hands-on exercises, and tests. Plesk University and the team behind it will be helping you along the way.

First steps to becoming a Plesk Support Engineer

Technical Knowledge - Plesk support engineer

First, we need to make sure, that you are familiar with all the basic OS and networking technologies at the Plesk’s core. For that end, we have two basic OS courses: one for Linux, and one for Windows.

Each course starts with a comprehensive test of your initial knowledge. This helps us identify knowledge gaps, tailor the course’s content to address them, and exclude topics with which you are already familiar, thus shortening education time.

Basic OS Courses

Plesk OS basic course

Basic OS courses consist of video, text and external resources that cover all manner of topics:

  • Command-line basics.
  • Linux package management.
  • Services and processes.
  • Networking fundamentals.
  • User and group management.
  • Installing and monitoring Windows services.
  • NTFS permissions.
  • …and many more.

We always recommend taking notes while studying – you will need them to complete small lab exercise after each topic. Practice is essential to learning and retaining the knowledge.

Advanced topics, such as MySQL, Apache/nginx/IIS, Firewall, and DNS, have complex lab exercises. For example, in the Apache exercise, your task is to install the web server, configure two name-based virtual hosts, and enable PHP on one of them. If you feel up to it, you can also complete bonus tasks: configure mod_rewrite rules and add a domain alias.

Completing these lab exercises will require your best efforts. You’ll need to use your notes, search through documentation, and look through available solutions on services like StackExchange and ServerFault. Then, find a way to achieve the required results.

StackOverflow Copy-Pasting by O'Reilly

Knowledge Assessment

Knowledge assessment test

Once we cover all topics, you’ll pass the post-training knowledge assessment. This is the same test you passed at the beginning of the course. It helps us measure the improvement of your skills and determine any possible knowledge gaps left after the training.

We need a +80% grade to consider the training a success. If the grade is lower, we’ll figure out the topics you’re struggling with together. Then, give you extra materials to study, before you can re-take the test.

Completing Basic OS courses takes around two weeks. After that, it is time to start learning about Plesk. For that, we use our official Plesk courses, which are also available to the public.

Plesk Onyx Courses – For Support Engineers too

Plesk Onyx Professional

In Plesk Onyx Professional, you’ll learn how to install, configure, and use Plesk. After each module, you’ll need to complete objectives on a test server. Install Plesk on Linux and Windows servers, configure security settings according to best practices, set up a service plan and create a customer account, and configure backup to a cloud storage or a FTP server.

At the end of this course, you should pass the Plesk Onyx Professional Certification exam. All Plesk Support engineers are required to earn a Professional certification before they start working on customers’ requests. Later, within first three months of your career, you also need to pass both Plesk Onyx Expert exams.

Then, in Plesk Onyx Expert courses (for Linux and for Windows), you will learn how to upgrade, maintain and troubleshoot a Plesk server. Each module in an Expert-level course has a troubleshooting lab exercise. Here your task is to troubleshoot and fix a problem after you run a “troublemaker” script on your server. The same script will help you determine if you succeeded or not.

After the Expert courses, you’ll learn about and try your hand at Migrating to Plesk Onyx. Further down the line you’ll get familiar with our top extensions: WordPress Toolkit, SEO Toolkit, Git, and Docker. As with all the previous courses in this education program, you are required to apply your newly acquired knowledge on practice. All of these are available at Plesk University.

Next stop: Graduation as Plesk Support Engineer

Plesk support engineers graduation

At this point, the technical part of your initial education is over. But before you graduate, you need to learn a bit more on how to be a support engineer. We’ll impart on you the best practices developed over the years. How to communicate effectively, handle conflict situations, safely process customers’ data, and be responsible in your work. You’ll also learn about our tools and processes.

And, finally, the day of your graduation has come! You have learned a lot about Plesk and you’re finally ready to start helping our customers. Your education will continue, fueled by new courses from Plesk University, materials from our knowledge base, collaboration with mentors, your colleagues, and Plesk developers. But that’s a story for another time.

5 easy steps to learn Plesk and become certified

Use Plesk University and get free of charge Plesk certification

At Plesk, we believe in pairing exceptional technology with the know-how to use these tools. That’s why we have made all courses and certificates from Plesk University free for everyone.

All our online courses are built with real-life scenarios, best practices, and use cases in mind. Allowing you to learn at your own pace at home, in the office, or on the go. Whichever course you pick, you can expect a hands-on experience in a safe learning environment. Through engaging activities and lab exercises.

After you complete a course, challenge yourself and take the exam to earn yourself a Plesk University certificate. Proving your expertise to your employers and colleagues. As well as boosting your chances of landing a new job, or a well-deserved pay raise.

Here’s how to get started:

Step 1: Register at Plesk University

Go to Plesk University and create a new account using your e-mail address. You’ll need to confirm your registration by clicking a link we send to your email inbox.

Register at Plesk University

Step 2: Learn Plesk

Plesk University grades its courses and certification exams to three levels of proficiency. Moreover, we address different target audience groups and educational needs

– Marketing & Sales Professionals

Are you a marketer or sales rep? Want to know how to package and sell solutions? Then the Solutions for Service Providers course is for you. You’ll learn how to use Plesk Onyx and its extensions to build specialized service offers. So you can switch from selling infrastructure to selling solutions.

– Server Administrators & Hosters

Want to start using Plesk Onyx on your server or deploy it for your customers? Then you’ll need the Plesk Onyx Professional Course. It gets you started on the path to becoming a Plesk Onyx administrator. And also guides you through installation, initial set up, provisioning hosting services, and basic administrative tasks.

– Server Administrators & Technical Engineers

For everything there is to know about upgrading, migrating, and troubleshooting Plesk Onyx – check the Expert courses. We have them for both Linux and Windows. And we built them for Plesk admins and Technical Support Engineers.

These courses also stem from in real-life scenarios. So they’ll fashion you into a self-reliant and confident Plesk Expert in no time.

Although you can choose to do the courses in any order, we recommend you complete the Plesk Onyx Professional Course before attempting the Expert courses. 😉

Step 3: Complete the course

Once you’ve decided which course to enroll for, head over to the course catalog to get started. All Plesk University courses are self-paced, and split into easily-digestible sessions. About 10 to 20 minutes each. You can pause and resume at any point if want to.

Plesk University courses

Expert-level courses now include additional instructions and scripts for lab exercises. Which you can complete in your own lab environment in order to practice troubleshooting tasks.

Step 4: Schedule an exam

Once you complete the course, we’ll automatically assign you a certification exam. However, there’s no requirement to complete the exam right away. So you can take your time to review and complete practical tasks.

All exams are conducted with a remote proctor. This little guy will verify your credentials and monitor your activity during the exam via web camera, microphone, and remote-access software. This procedure guarantees that we only grant Plesk certificates when users fully earn them.

How do you schedule the exam? Start by making a free exam appointment at least 72 hours in advance. Or else, you can even pay a small fee for priority scheduling. You know, if you just can’t wait to get that sweet certificate. Which we understand, of course.

You’ll find instructions on how to schedule an exam appointment in the intro to each Plesk certification course.

Step 5: Pass the exam

When the time comes, start your exam as we guide you to in the introduction to the certification course. The proctor will verify your identity. Then it will secure your environment by observing your workplace and closing all disallowed programs during the exam. You’ll then unlock the exam with a password. Ta-da! It’s all fancy stuff.

The exam takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete and contains 20 to 30 multiple-choice scenario-based questions. This, however, depends on the level. In order to pass the exam, you need at least 80% of questions to be correct.

If you fail your first try, no judgment – we don’t make it that easy anyway. But you’ll have to wait seven days for your next opportunity to pass the exam. We suggest you spend this time revising course materials because unfortunately, we don’t provide a third attempt at the moment.

Share your success

Once you’ve passed the exam, you’ll get an automatic certificate which you’ll be able to download and print as a PDF. Here’s what it will look like:

PLesk University - 5 steps to get certiofied and how to share your success - screenshot 1
PLesk University - 5 steps to get certiofied and how to share your success - screenshot 2

We’ll also issue you a shiny digital badge within five business days of you completing the exam. And what’s more, you can share this badge on social media channels, and even embed it to your LinkedIn. Or if email’s your thing still, you can add it to your email signature.

Questions? Check our FAQ or send us a message at [email protected]. In the meantime, class dismissed! 🙂