Important Update: Introducing Professional-Level Certifications and a New Cloud Security Certification!

[aallen]

Important Update: Introducing Professional-Level Certifications and a New Cloud Security Certification!

Palo Alto Networks is pleased to announce significant enhancements to our certification program, designed to better recognize your expertise.

Effective May 30, 2025, our "Generalist" certification level will be renamed to "Professional." This change more accurately reflects the advanced skills validated by these certification exams.

Key Changes:

• The Network Security Generalist certification and exam will be renamed the Network Security Professional certification and exam.
• The Security Operations Generalist certification and exam will be renamed the Security Operations Professional certification and exam.

No action is required from you. These changes will be automatically made across all systems, programs, digital badges, and eCertificates.

Exciting New Offering:

We are also thrilled to announce the release of the new Cloud Security Professional certification on May 30, 2025!

This certification is ideal for current and aspiring Cloud Security administrators and SOC analysts. It validates essential knowledge and skills for securing cloud environments with the Cortex Cloud platform, covering:

• Cortex Cloud platform
• Cloud Runtime Security
• Application Security
• Cloud Posture Security
• SOC processes

Thank you for your support of the Palo Alto Networks Certification Program. We are committed to maximizing the value of our certifications to support your continued professional development and career growth. 

Cortex XDR Prisma Cloud Strata Cloud Manager Strata Logging Service Cortex XSIAM Cortex XSOAR NGFW Panorama 

[chris.swain]

Whilst updating these certifications into a new role based framework is a good thing, the slow and gradual dissemination of the changes to your certification program has been disappointing.

The drip-feed of smaller announcements with cert changes every month or two has kept everyone engaged, but for the wrong reasons. This approach has led to many professionals and organisations having an unclear plan of how to plan education for their Engineers and Analysts; budgeting, allocating training time, and planning for this has been difficult. A much better approach would have been to simply carefully publish the FULL framework of certifications in one go. We would really appreciate it if the full plan of this new role based framework could just be published, and remove this uncertainty. This is not just the opinion of me, but of almost every engineer using Palo Alto equipment I have encountered.

[Gustavo_Xavier]

While it's great to see Palo Alto Networks expanding and improving its certification offerings, the new naming convention seems to add unnecessary complexity. Previously, certifications like PCNSE were much easier to recognize and identify in the industry. With the shift to broader names like "Professional," it becomes less clear what each certification specifically represents. The market still highly values the original nomenclature, and moving away from it might create confusion rather than clarity.