After all the activity last year, you may have been wondering what’s happened with the SSAS Maestro Program – the premier certification for Analysis Services professionals (for some more background information see here). Well, wonder no more: my fellow SSAS Maestro Marco Russo and I will be running the course again in Milan this summer on the 9th-13th July.
There are a few things that are going to be different with this run of the course which I need to point out:
- It’s no longer invitation-only so anyone can apply to attend. However we’ll only have 20 spaces in the training room and this, plus the fact that this is a very demanding course, means we’ll only be accepting people who have a lot of previous SSAS experience.
- It’s no longer free either. The cost will be €7000 plus taxes for five days of training plus the exam/coursework/labs, although people who have previously attended the Maestros course will only have to pay €5000 plus taxes. That’s fairly expensive I know, but there’s a lot of work involved in organising a one-off course like this, a lot of marking to be done afterwards and there are also a lot of overheads as well as two trainers to pay.
- The marking process will be a lot faster this time!
If you’re interested in attending please send Marco and me an email at ssasmaestro@sqlbi.com, along with a copy of your CV/resume and a few paragraphs detailing your level of SSAS knowledge. We’ll be opening registrations in mid-April and we’ll be able to let you know whether you’ve been accepted then.
Um, yeah.
€7000 (plus tax) seems to be highly overpriced. Just compare it to a SQL MCM training (http://sqlmcm.quickstart.com/microsoft_certified_master.aspx). AFAIK there is no online version of SSAS Maestros yet, so travel and accomodation fees apply as well (however it’s just a fraction of the training price).
I wonder why there are no such exam exist like SQL MCM yet? The biggest difference is that attending a training is not mandatory – if you have 8-10 years of experience in many of the features of SQL Server, you can just go and evaluate yourself for $500 in the first round.
But, at least, there are news about it!
We missed it a lot, thanks for sharing, Chris!
It is a bit pricey for independants. I suspect there will be a master certification path covering the BI stack in the pipework. Would be interesting to know whether passing the maestro gives you any headway in any BI Master cert (if one emerges). Hopefully I won’t have spend time revising the data mining part of SSAS to pass it lol ;p
I wouldn’t expect to see a BI MCM any time soon 🙁
But yes, you won’t need to know any data mining for this course….
Is there any public information why the Maestro course (scheduled to Jul 9-13 in Milan) costs “only” €4500? Just spot it at http://www.sqlbi.com/training/ssas-maestro … Now it’s getting comparable to SQL MCM… 🙂
It’s because it’s much more expensive to run than a regular course – the hardware requirements for the labs alone are demanding, and then you have to pay costs for me, Marco and Thomas Kejser, and for marking the exams and case studies.
OK… I overlooked this post: http://cwebbbi.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/registration-open-for-ssas-maestros-course-july-9-13-milan-italy . It’s clear now, thanks.
Everything I heard about the last Maestros course sounded appalling, including the delivery and organization. The marking also took about a year and was bizarre in the way it was done and basically wasted the time of the attendees.
I’m sorry to hear you heard such bad things about the course. Certainly there have been big issues with the amount of time it took to do the marking, which I can only blame on Microsoft bureaucracy. However as someone who was an attendee on the first round (in London) and helped teach the second round (in Madrid), I was very happy with the substance of the course and all the people I know who’ve been on it also got a lot out of it.
Hi Chris, I was on the delivery last year in Redmond and would have to concur with what Terry’s commented about. I found it very frustrating, costly (it’s not just course costs that matter) and disappointing in so many ways. Wish it wasn’t so. Happy to fill yo in online some time.
was meant to say “Happy to fill you in offline sometime” 🙂