Last week I passed my “Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate” exam. This is actually a transition exam to catch up my previous Azure certification to the state of Azure as of 2019. I had passed the original “Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastruct Solutions” exam back in 2015 and Microsoft have now retired that certification and replaced with the Administrator associate classification. I don’t know about you, but I think the previous qualification sounds more official and impressive than just being an Associate.

The other interesting thing is that I received an email from Microsoft after passing to say I can claim my badge from Acclaim – a company I have never heard of. Nowhere in the email did it mention LinkedIn. Considering Microsoft purchased LinkedIn, I would have expected them to be pushing this platform as the place to show off the new certifications.

Not only that, but when I logged into LinkedIn, it is no longer possible to order the certifications (so the new one shows up at the bottom of the list under more…) and it doesn’t announce to LinkedIn followers that you’ve passed a certification exam.

To make matter worse, attempting to sign up for Acclaim with Chrome fails as the page does not allow you enter any password (but it works with Edge). The account also is created with my work email address rather than my personal email address that my Microsoft certifications are tied to.

By using Edge I was able to create an account. It is then possible to go into the account settings and add my Microsoft account as the primary email address, copy/pasting the confirmation link into Edge each time.

Once logged into Acclaim, it is recommended to activate 2FA under the Password section but make sure you change the description of the website to Acclaim in your 2FA app rather than leaving it as the default which is your email address.