Esper Chawah has been building tech certification programs since the early 1990s, long enough to watch them earn trust, lose it, and slowly drift into irrelevance.
He’s worked inside the systems that defined what certification was supposed to mean, at Microsoft, Symantec, BlackBerry, Cloudera and many others. And across those decades, he’s seen the same failure mode repeat. As he puts it:
Cert programs collapse not because people are somehow resistant to learning, but rather because few clearly define what competence is supposed to look like. And when that mark is vague, the credential turns into something that looks a lot more like performance than actual proof.
That perspective matters because certification today carries real fatigue. He says that too many programs confuse exposure with mastery and for that matter, too many exams reward recall rather than practical judgment.
Too many credentials read well on a resume until the first outage, scaling failure, or architectural redesign exposes how shallow they are. Employers know this and practitioners know it too.
VAST Certification is being introduced with that reality fully in view.
Rather than positioning itself as novel or disruptive, Chawah, who heads technical certification at VAST, argues the program is deliberately conservative in the ways that matter.
The goal, Chawah says, is not to invent a new kind of credential, but to place VAST squarely inside the same credibility class as the certification programs enterprises already rely on (think the gold standard programs like those from Cisco, VMware and HPE). These are programs where certification carries meaning because it’s built around industry best practices, real scenario testing, and clearly defined expectations.
And in a landscape crowded with what he bluntly calls “garbage programs”, legitimacy comes from rigor instead of empty rhetoric.
That rigor shows up in how the certification is structured and what it actually tests.
VAST Certification is designed around applied competence across the platform instead of narrow feature recall. In areas where administrators are expected to actively design, configure, and operate the system, the exam tests decision making in realistic scenarios. So for instance, given a set of constraints, how would you architect a solution? How would you balance performance, resilience, and operational simplicity? Where tradeoffs exist, which ones matter and why?
In other areas, particularly newer parts of the platform, the test is awareness and systems understanding. So poking into questions like whether or not you know what capabilities exist? Do you understand how components interact? Do you recognize when functionality that looks external or separate can in fact be consolidated inside the platform?
At minimum, certification ensures administrators know the full shape of what they are responsible for. And at best, it changes how teams think about architecture and cost across their environment.
This is where the value proposition for organizations becomes concrete.
In practical terms, the VAST Certified Administrator exam evaluates whether an administrator can operate a VAST environment under real production conditions.
The scope spans routine and high-impact operational tasks, including safely removing and reintegrating nodes during maintenance windows, configuring and expanding VIP pools, assigning VLANs, and establishing BGP peering for routed environments.
Candidates are expected to demonstrate fluency across file, object, and block protocols, to monitor cluster health across CNodes, DNodes, and network components, and to use built-in analytics to identify performance anomalies, capacity trends, and imbalanced workloads before they escalate into user-facing issues.
The exam also places significant emphasis on change management and systems reasoning. Candidates are tested on their ability to anticipate the effects of configuration changes on end users, including the application of QoS policies, tenant isolation, view access controls, and replication behavior. They are expected to understand how to segment data and clients cleanly in multi-tenant environments, audit access at scale, and move confidently between the WebUI, CLI, and API depending on the task.
Architectural fundamentals, including data reduction, erasure coding, and VAST’s disaggregated shared-everything design, are assessed in the context of operational decision making. The focus throughout is on judgment, impact awareness, and execution in environments that are already carrying production workloads.
VAST has grown into a platform with more surface area than many teams initially realize. Certification forces that surface area into focus.
It reduces the risk that customers underutilize what they already own. And in this process, it’s creating the internal experts who can challenge assumptions like why a separate database exists, or why security tooling is fragmented, or why data pipelines are more complex than they need to be.
For individuals, the value is just as clear. Certification validates skills that are often hard to demonstrate cleanly. It creates a portable signal that says hey, this person can actually operate the platform under real conditions instead of just talking about it.
For companies, certification reduces hiring and staffing uncertainty. Esper points to a familiar dilemma:
When platforms rely heavily on loosely structured ecosystems or informal skill validation, staffing becomes a bit of a gamble. Formal training and certification change that equation, allowing organizations to make safer assumptions about who can be trusted to run critical systems.
Over time, that predictability influences platform decisions just as much as technical features do.
VAST Forward is where this philosophy becomes tangible. The certification program formally launches at the event, February 24 to 26, 2026, in Salt Lake City.
A boot camp refresher session precedes the exam, creating a focused window to consolidate existing knowledge. The exam itself is administered on site and to simplify matters, the cost is included with conference registration.
As Chawah emphasizes, there’s no promise that two days can manufacture expertise (the assumption is that attendees already have hands-on experience) but the certification measures it.
Attending VAST FWD is an opportunity to deepen platform understanding, validate operational skills, and return with concrete proof of capability. Teams come back better equipped to extract value from their VAST investment. Individuals return with credentials that reflect real competence. Both sides win without pretending the work is easy.
And think about this….At launch, there are no VAST Certified Administrators in the world. Someone at VAST FWD will be the first. Before the credential becomes common and before the signal weakens through volume.
In technical careers, early certification in a platform that is still expanding its footprint carries long tail value. It differentiates quietly and persistently.
VAST Certification starts by defining competence clearly and testing against it honestly. That discipline is what separates certification as infrastructure from certification as marketing.
VAST Certification is arriving at the moment when the platform itself has reached a level of complexity that demands this kind of rigor. VAST FWD is where that demand becomes visible.
See you there.
Be among the first in the world to earn your VAST Certified Administrator credential. Secure your spot at VAST FWD and turn your expertise into a gold-standard signal.
