Wednesday, December 14, 2016

History of the CCDE, Part 3 -- 2013 to Present


(Click these links for Part 1 -- Origin to 2008, and Part 2 -- 2009 to 2012)
First, congratulations to all of my students who successfully passed the CCDE exam in 2016. I am proud to announce that our community of CCDE candidates has nearly reached one hundred successful students, including fourteen students this year. A recent successful student wrote the following recommendation of my training after passing his CCDE exam:
I attended Jeremy’s virtual bootcamp in October 2016, 3 weeks before my first and final CCDE attempt. The bootcamp to be extremely helpful in achieving the CCDE mindset. Jeremy covers a wide variety of technologies at a high level; the expectation is that students are already technical experts and are seeking to sharpen their analysis and design skills. These core skills are what separate CCIEs from CCDEs and Jeremy’s training material best addresses these skills. His scenarios are very realistic and, again, are primarily focused on critical thinking and problem solving, which is precisely what the real exam does. I highly recommend Jeremy’s bootcamp and self-paced study material for anyone serious about achieving the CCDE. -- Nick Russo, CCDE 2016::41
This article picks up from the beginning of 2013. Over the course of four test dates in 2013, we nearly doubled the total number of successful CCDEs. We started the year with 90 CCDEs, and added 81 more. This was by far the largest number of new CCDEs in a single year. In 2014 we literally one-upped the previous year, as 82 candidates passed the Practical exam. During these two years we nearly tripled the total number of CCDEs to 253. This still stands as the record number of passing students in a calendar year.
These two years also saw a broad diversity of CCDEs. Just looking at my successful students during this time period we saw the first CCDEs from the following countries:
  • Chile
  • Colombia
  • India
  • Indonesia
  • Lebanon
  • Oman
  • Qatar
Over fifty of my students passed during these years. In some ways, it seems as though these years were the golden age of the CCDE program. After the great success of these years, 2015 and 2016 were slightly disappointing. Only 47 candidates were able to earn the CCDE certification in 2015, and this year saw exactly the same number of successful candidates. During conversations with CCDE program members I have learned that most of the reduction in successful candidates can be attributed to fewer candidates, and not to more difficult exams. Of course each exam date brings new content, so we cannot say with confidence that the exam difficulty has remained the same.
The last two years have also seen an global expansion of the CCDE program. I have had students pass the exam from countries such as Austria, Ghana, Luxembourg, Malaysia, and Romania. And of course, many students from the United States, Germany, France, etc. Thus far I have had successful students from 36 unique countries.
I am looking forward to what 2017 will bring to the CCDE program. With four upcoming exam dates and no announced changes to the Practical exam, we should see quite a few new CCDEs in the coming year. There are also rumors of changes to the recertification process. Stay tuned!

Thank you for reading!
Jeremy