User Type requirement for PCNSE exam

[martin.smid1]

Hello,

I was wondering if anyone can help regarding the User Type required before scheduling PCNSE exam with Pearson VUE. The options are 1) Customer, 2) Partner, 3) Academy and 4 Palo Employee and I really have no idea what I am supposed to pick. My Palo account is linked to my gmail email address, as I have no intention "locking" my certificates to an account with an email address of my employer. I have been in a situation before where my certificates (other vendor) were linked to an account with my business email. I forgot the password and after leaving the employer, I had naturally no access to the email in order to reset the said password and gain access to my certifications. So with that, any ideas which one of these options am I supposed to pick if I want to use my account with my personal email address?

Thank you

[BPry]

@martin.smid1,

Well ... what are you? That's really all it's asking. 

1) Customer - You are a customer of Palo Alto Networks or work directly with their gear.

2) Partner - You work for a partner of Palo Alto Networks

3) Academy - I think this is what you pick when going through PAN sponsered training. 

4) Palo Employee - You are employed by Palo Alto Networks.

Since you're asking, I'm going to go with you should probably select Customer unless you work for a PAN partner. 

As for locking out your certifications, this is a process that you should just need to make a call to the vendor to get rectified. Some vendors however do actually tie this to the employer and leaving the employer will require you to re-take the certification under your new account (Panasonic and Extreme were like this previously). 

[martin.smid1]

hi@BPry

thanks for the reply. I am just a guy who works with Palo firewalls. I am not their customer as I don't by anything from them (my clients and employers do that), I am not their partner as I don't resell their equipment, I am not Academy as my uni days are long gone 🙂 and I am definitely not a Palo employee. So, any ideas?

I work for IBM who I believe have partnered with Palo, but again, my Palo account doesn't use my IBM email address and they have that nasty little sentense in the exam booking "if the provided information doesn't match our records, you might not be granted the certification". So even if I said I am a Palo partner and put in IBM as my employer, putting in my IBM email address won't work. Because I am not registered with it and I doubt using my gmail email address in combination with IBM will work.

I am not quite sure why this is such an important piece of information for them. As long as I pay for the exam and don't cheat, why should it matter who I work for or whether I am a customer or a reseller? They have my Palo ID so they know what account is linked to the exam.

[martin.smid1 · Accepted solution]

So eventually I got a reply from Palo directly through our account team. Here is a response from Palo certification support team

"It is up to the individual taking the exam how they want to register and what email to use. In this case, you can have the person register as Customer and put their name as company name and use their personal email address. Those fields are really more important for Partners who need to have their certifications, so everything needs to align with other systems"

Hopefully this helps to any future test takers

[srajput]

Hi Martin,

This is great information and exactly what I was looking for. But did this really work, and were you able to pass exam and get your certification using your personal name as company and personal email address? @martin.smid1 

[slemmon]

Did this work for you using your own personal name and email? Did you get credit for it and receive the cert? Seeing this, I did it the same way and have my exam in 3 weeks.