Is the Pearson VUE Testing Center Network Collapsing?

6 January 2012 by 8 Comments

Since my day job is teaching, I need to do a lot of certification tests. There are periods of time when I seem to live in a Pearson VUE testing center. However, In the past three months I’ve noticed the number of testing centers has dropped significantly.  There used to be three in the Portland metro area, but about three months ago that number went down to zero. One came back, but there aren’t any open testing dates until March now.

Which is a problem, because I need to do my VCP5 certification before Feb 29th, 2012, otherwise in order to get the VCP5 certification I’ll have to take a course (I’m a current VCP4 holder).

I brought this up on Twitter a few months ago, and a few people responded they had issues as well recently with no local testing centers.

So I wonder, is the Pearson VUE testing network collapsing? Or is it just Portland, Oregon?

My dream of a VCP5 is collapsing

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About Tony Bourke

Tony Bourke is an IT instructor teaching Cisco and other courses for various organizations. He writes about the hilarity of the converged roles at datacenteroverlords.com and random musing on twitter @tbourke. He's also an amateur pilot, scuba diver, marathon runner, and crazy cat lady.

  • Matt

    I have noticed the same issue in the UK, IMHO the problem is the model VUE uses, unless you get a resonable number of candidates through the door the testing centre never sees any return on the investment.

  • http://www.perteghella.org/ Giovanni Perteghella

    It also appended in Italy some years ago, I suppose to “clean” the database of VUE centers. Now the number is increased and returned to level of 4 years ago but the problems are the distribution on territory and scheduling openings.

    I asked for the minimum number of candidates and it’s around 20/months to recive a small refound.

  • Fernando Montenegro

    Living in a suburb of a large metro area – Toronto – I can’t complain, but I have noticed some changes with centers dropping or moving to different (usually smaller) locations.

  • Anonymous

    I’ve noticed a couple of testing centers are no longer available in the Richmond area as well. I don’t know if it’s just businesses closing because of the recession or something because of pearsonvue.

  • Kevin Breit

    I’m in the Chicago area and I’ve seen a few shut down. Not only are they shutting down, the availability to take tests is a little more scarce than it used to be.

  • http://twitter.com/cchayre Christopher Hayre

    Thanks for shedding some light on this.  I’ve noticed it becoming increasingly difficult the last 6-12 months to schedule a test in my area.  A testing center (or two) have seemingly disappeared, and appointments are hard to come by sooner than 2 months ahead (minimum).

  • Raj

    I am running a test centre in india. Through my experience I realised that  Pearson VUE test centre is not a profitable business. I spend INR 1.5 Lakh to setup this centre.

  • http://twitter.com/ssl_boy Glen Kemp

    This is problem we’ve run into as well, we have to certify about 15 engineers in about 10 different topics and both Prometric and VUE every two years. We are having to travel further and further and it adds a significant cost and time burden to something we HAVE to do to maintain partner accreditation, it blows no matter what way you look at it..