CIW Plans New Foundations Exam

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CIW Plans New Foundations Exam

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Published: Wednesday, July 28, 2004

• Relates to: CIW Associate | CIW Security Analyst | CIW Web Developer | CIW Professional

The cornerstone exam for the Certified Internet Webmaster program—namely, the CIW Foundations exam—has been changed. The new exam, known as CIW v5 Foundations in official terminology, will be released in Fall, 2004. Courseware for the new coverage is already available. Though additional information galore is available at the CIW Web site, the exam sponsor claims that the courseware (and thus, presumably also, the upcoming v5 exam) includes the following "substantial improvements" over the CIW v4 Foundations courseware:

Labs standardized to Windows XP Professional
Case Studies that discuss real-life applications of skills
Optional movie clips that review concepts in a multimedia format
Expanded information about job roles and careers in the IT industry
Project management concepts and skills for individuals and teams
Increased emphasis on Web accessibility standards
Web development labs updated from HTML 4.01 to XHTML 1.0
Web development labs based on the not-for-profit organization Habitat for Humanity site
New courseware titles: Internet Business Foundations, Site Development Foundations, and Network Technology Foundations
Updated IT security topics, including firewalls, spyware, copyright protection, and other security-related issues

(Note: The preceding bulleted list is quoted directly from the aforementioned CIW Web page.)

To dig into the CIW v5 Foundations exam, one must dig into the CIW v5 Foundations courseware, which consists of three new and thoroughly revamped courses:

These documents are must-reads because they're as close to providing detailed exam objectives as the CIW sponsoring organization, ProsoftTraining, actually comes.

What's also interesting about this new exam is that ProsoftTraining has apparently decided to break the CIW Foundations exam links with the CompTIA i-Net+ exam. Through v4, the two exams were treated as nearly synonymous (and ProsoftTraining freely granted credit for CIW Foundations to those who passed the i-Net+ exam). Starting with v5, this linkage is broken, and i-Net+ no longer counts toward exam credit for CIW certifications. I believe this reflects CompTIA's presumed decision not to continue tracking ProsoftTraining's exam update and development schedule, since no news about planned updates to the i-Net+ exam are available from CompTIA. Informed sources indicate that i-Net+ has not been a terribly popular exam, which may explain CompTIA's apparent reluctance to invest in a new version just to keep up with the CIW certification program.