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I passed AWS Machine Learning — Specialty (MLS-C01)

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The email I received from Credly with my AWS ML Specialty badge

As I explained in a previous blog post, when AWS announced their new Generative AI Developer Professional certification (AIP-C01), they also informed that they would be discontinuing the Machine Learning Specialty certification (MLS-C01). It's going away soon (31 March 2026 is the last day one can take it), so I made an effort and decided to get it before it's no longer possible. Last week I took the exam and passed! 🥳

Reasons to take this discontinued certification

Why get this certification if it's going away? I had several reasons to do so:

  • The cert is still valid for 3 whole years. I won't be able to renew it once it expires, but for the next 3 years the cert is valid and is a testament that I know about ML in AWS.
  • It was my first ever AWS Specialty certification exam and I was curious to probe its difficulty.
  • I had already passed the AWS Machine Learning Engineer Associate (MLA-C01) and the AWS Generative AI Developer Professional (AIP-C01) certs before. This ML Specialty certification had a massive overlap with the content from MLA-C01 (about ~85% of the content), so I barely had to learn new things to pass ML Specialty, just review a bunch of material.
  • ML Specialty asks you generic data science and ML questions that are vendor agnostic and not only AWS-related questions, so in a way I also got generic data and ML knowledge validated.

Impressions and Results

This ML Specialty exam felt slightly harder than MLA-C01, and much easier than AIP-C01 (to be fair, I did take AIP-C01 during its beta period, which makes it extra challenging). The results also seem to corroborate my feelings, I achieved quite a nice score while I barely passed AIP-C01 two months ago:

My MLS-C01 exam report with my exam score

All in all I'm happy I got this cert, it was quite a low-hanging fruit for me since I already had done other AI certs for AWS. Unlike for the other AWS certs that I hold, I won't be releasing study notes or flashcards for ML Specialty, since soon nobody will be able to take the exam anyway. But if you're curious and want to tackle the challenge within the next two weeks, refer to my study notes and flashcards for MLA-C01, as I said 85% of the material is the same (just the focus of the exams is slightly different).

ML Specialty focuses exclusively on traditional ML and deep learning (DL) and does not validate your knowledge of modern Generative AI. I understand why it gets discontinued since GenAI is all the rage right now. Traditional ML and DL appear to be so much more niche these days in the industry. Still, I'm saddened by this trend. Generative AI got where it got thanks to traditional ML and DL. There are still plenty of problems in the industry that are much better suited for ML/DL than for GenAI, yet so many companies and projects are trying to shoehorn an LLM where it's not optimal. It was also quite unique to have an AWS cert that asked you plenty of vendor agnostic questions, the new AI certs pretty much quiz you only on their AI products... Oh well. Hopefully we get to see this kind of cert in the future from AWS again!