How to Renew Your CompTIA Security+ Cert by Adding CE Units
Important: You only need to renew the highest-level active cert you have and your active lower-level certs will also renew. For example, if you renew Security+, then if you also have active Network+ and A+ certs, they will also renew.
Ways to Renew your Cert (yes, they all cost money):
· Pass the current / latest version of the same exam.
· Pass a higher level CompTIA Exam.
· Take the CompTIA CertMaster CE course.
o This includes the $150 renewal fee (check CompTIA for the current price of this course).
o Currently available for A+, Network+, and Security+.
o Must score 100% to pass (but unlimited retakes allowed).
o Takes about 8 to 10 hours to finish.
· Upload Continuing Education credits (CompTIA calls them Continuing Education Units or CEUs). They are proof of your industry activities which can consist of completed courses, technical papers, webinars, job experience, etc. and pay the $150 maintenance fee ($50 per year or $150 total over your 3-year cycle). The number of CEUs required depends on your highest level cert, (for example, 50 hours / CEUs for Security+).
For more info: CompTIA’s Choose Your Activities
How to Renew Your CompTIA Security+ Cert by Adding CE Units
1.
Login through the Comptia.org site > click on the Login dropdown (upper right-hand corner) > select CompTIA Central.
2.
It will take you to a login page. After logging
in it will take you to the CompTIA Home page.
3.
Scroll down and on the right-hand side under Access Certifications > click View Certification Account.
It will open a Certification Status page. It may look overwhelming at first glance, but you just need to do three steps:
1) Agree to the Continuing Education Code of Ethics Agreement.
2) Pay CE Fees.
3) Add your continuing education activities to earn credits.
Does CompTIA make this easy and straightforward? Absolutely not.
Is the UI intuitive and helpful? Nope.
That’s why I made this blog post detailing my process.
Continuing Education Code of Ethics Agreement
The easiest way to kind of accomplish the three steps is to go through the first three links under CERTIFICATIONS in the left hand navigation:
Continuing Education Code of Ethics Agreement
Under CERTIFICATIONS > click on Continuing Education Code of Ethics Agreement.
This opens up the Certification Agreement page.
CompTIA emphasizes this multiple times: you must sign the agreement. They just don’t tell you how.
You can review the Candidate Agreement and Code of Ethics agreement through the links they provide:
Intuitively, I thought, well, I could just sign with a digital signature. Except on the Agreement pages, neither of these asks for a signature.
Instead, on the Certification Agreement page, scroll down to a section called ‘Certification Agreement’. You check the agreement boxes and click the red button. I don’t have a screenshot of that, only the aftermath of clicking the red button.
So it turns out, the red button disappearing is confirmation that you have successfully accepted the agreements.
Note: Going further down is a CompTIA CE Program Policy Agreement. I have no idea what to do with that.
Moving along, let’s Pay the CE fees. But before that, you can check how much it costs through the Continuing Education Progress page.
Why isn’t how much you owe on the Pay the CE Fees page? You’ll have to ask CompTIA. It would make sense to have it on that page, but oh, well.
Continuing Education Progress
Under CERTIFICATIONS > Continuing Education Progress.
This page starts with the reminder to sign your Code of Ethics Agreement. Personally, I think it would be helpful to have a link to that page.
It does give you a link to go to the page where you can upload your activities to earn credits to renew your certification. If you missed it, I have it highlighted below.
But first, pay your renewal fee!
Scroll down the page to find out how much you owe. It’s at the very bottom.
Now that you know how much you need to pay, go to the Pay CE Fees page.
Pay CE Fees
Under CERTIFICATIONS > Pay CE Fees.
Now you can’t just pay the fee, that would be too straightforward.
No, you have to buy tokens which are sold in increments of 25 and 50. I’m guessing if your employer paid part of the fee or you used another method that paid part of the fee, you can make up the rest in the tokens.
So you would click on the CompTIA’s store link to buy the tokens.
Note: Regarding the last line on seeing your fee progress, it takes you to the Continuing Education Progress page. You have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of that page where it shows how much you owe in fees and it will update the FEES PAID and FEES REMAINING if you put in your tokens one at a time. Here’s a reminder screenshot:
Okay, so you click the link to get to the CompTIA store. You’d think this would be a token purchase page. Nope, this is a listing of all the certs they offer and you have to find your cert. I just hit CTRL+f ('find' shortcut) and searched for security+.
After you select it, it will take you to the Security+ page. At this time, a new version of the exam is coming out. But I took the old version so I click on that.
It takes me to the Security+ V7 page > click Buy Now.
You’ll see a large listing of products. Scroll all the way down to Continuing education.
Now this is what confused me. There are two tokens, one 25 and one 50. Which one do I choose? I didn’t want to buy one that couldn’t be used.
So I consulted CompTIA’s AI chatbot. It told me to get six Continuing Education Token 25 tokens. I asked it about the 50 token. It responded, ‘Oh, well if there’s that option, you can buy that.’
Yes, this was one of many WTF moments I had while dealing with CompTIA’s site. These are its products and the AI doesn’t know about them?
So I clicked on Help at the very bottom of the page to try to access support.
I did go through their Knowledge Base and read the articles, but it just said to use tokens. I needed to be sure because this is my hard earned money.
On their Customer Support page, I scrolled down until I hit the Submit a help request button and submitted a ticket.
Now the process of getting help was a trip.
First, I got a ‘Please verify your email address’ email from Zendesk.
The template replacement field where a link should be was not very helpful. Luckily, the link was at the very bottom of the email.
The return email was very detailed, but it did not mention the $50 token.
However, I did get a reply to my help ticket very quickly. And by quickly, I mean in less than 20 minutes.
So kudos to CompTIA for the very fast support!
And yes, I can buy the $50 tokens to pay. I know logically it would make sense, but this is CompTIA. If this $50 token was for something else then I would have bought it for nothing.
So I bought three $50 tokens. My order confirmation was a little funky.
Under Order Delivery when I clicked on Order History and Customer Profile, they took me to the Microsoft account sign in page. What’s up with that?
But in less than twenty minutes, I got the email with my token code.
Still with me? Okay, back to the task at hand, paying the CE fee.
Paying the CE Fee
On the Pay Continuing Education Fees page go down to the Pay Continuing Education Fees section and enter each CE Token code and click ADD TOKEN for each one.
Go back to the Continuing Education Progress page and scroll down to the bottom where you can see if the FEES PAID is $150.00 and the FEES REMAINING should be $0.00.
When this is completed, scroll up to the top of the page and click on the link to start uploading your activities to earn CE units. You will need 50 units to successfully renew.
Or on the left-hand navigation, it is the last link under CERTIFICATIONS:
Continuing Education – Enter Activity
Interestingly enough, this page does remind you to sign the Code of Ethics and Candidate Agreement AND gives you a link.
Scroll down the page to Upload CE Activities.
Intent is, of course, Recertification.
Under Credentials, if you have multiple certs, select the highest level cert.
And fill out the rest of the fields according to your activity. For example, I did courses and blog posts. My courses actually made up all my CE units because an hour of a course was a CE unit. I took over 50 hours of course time so I fulfilled my renewal requirement.
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