AB-650

Pros

• Starting from zero, go straight for AB-650, that's the one that'll be on job ads a year from now.
• If you're more on the M365 admin side AB-650 has a big AI services chunk too
• For the M365 side I would then advise going for the AB-650, it's due to be out of beta October-ish as the replacement for the outgoing MS-102 certification
• I have done also the exam last week and i think the exam is well balanced, i agree with you that MS-102 is more a security exam and that ab-650 is closer to the real world.
• I agree and I actually find AB-650 very interesting.

Cons

• I've sat the AB-650 exam and while it has a heavy copilot "flavor" to it, it definitely in terms of the actual knowledge being assessed is heavier on the non-AI stuff than AI itself
• The replacement is AB-650, and here's the bit that annoyed me when I read the announcement: MS-102 was half of the Administrator Expert credential. AB-650 is a single associate exam. So the expert-level M365 admin cert just goes away, an...
• yes MS-102 is gone, replaced with AB-650 some AI bs from MS..i hate everything about this.
• It was a very long test, longer than I am used to, but I heard beta exams are longer than normal. The difficulty was not that bad, though there were a load of Purview questions 🥲
• The new "associate" exam is not a pure restoration of it's prior counterpart. Those topics like exchange and SharePoint are only 20 to 25% of the the exam, with AI slop being the primary focus. You're not going to sit here and tell anyon...