What happened to Fortinet's FCP and FCSS certifications?

An honest, cited answer. We make no ROI, salary, placement, or 'worth it' claim, and we don't track live job demand — where we don't know, we say so.

Fortinet retired the FCF/FCA/FCP/FCSS/FCX naming scheme and went back to NSE names. When we read Fortinet's Training Institute help desk on 2026-07-30:

Effective July 15, 2026, the following certifications will be retired: FCF, FCA, FCP, FCSS, FCX

If you already hold one, you are not being asked to re-sit anything:

You will be issued an NSE certification badge and certificate for each active NSE certification awarded. Your FCF, FCA, FCP, FCSS, and FCX certifications will remain in your certification history.

Alongside the rename, Fortinet expanded the programme from five certification levels to eight across four tracks — Secure Networking, Security Operations, Cloud Security and SASE — and added stand-alone industry certifications.

What Fortinet does and does not tell you about your specific exam. Fortinet publishes a table mapping an exam you passed on or after 15 July 2024 to a certification you hold from 15 July 2026 — for example FortiOS Administrator to NSE 4, or Enterprise Firewall Administrator to NSE 7 in Secure Networking. That table maps to a level and track, not to a named replacement exam, and it carries no version numbers. A few entries appear twice against different tracks.

For a named exam-to-exam replacement, we found exactly one relevant statement:

The NSE 5 - FortiManager 7.6 Administrator exam will end delivery on July 11th and be replaced by the NSE 6 - FortiManager 7.6 Administrator exam on July 15th.

That one matters beyond FortiManager, because it shows the change was not a flat rename: this exam moved up a level. Anyone translating an old exam name into a new one in their head would have got it wrong.

Worth knowing before you plan around continuity: Fortinet's discontinued-exam table marks rows whose replacement is coming with an asterisk, and several exams discontinued on 15 July 2026 carry no asterisk at all — among them LAN Edge Architect, Network Security Support Engineer and SD-WAN Enterprise Administrator. No replacement is flagged as pending for those. That is not the same as saying none will appear, but it is the opposite of a stated continuity, and it is worth checking directly if one of them was your plan.

What we don't know

We are not publishing a one-to-one old-exam-to-new-exam mapping, because with the single FortiManager exception Fortinet does not state one — the mapping it publishes resolves to a level and track, not to a named exam. Anything more specific would be our inference rather than Fortinet's statement, and two of the rows are genuinely ambiguous because the same old exam name is listed against two different tracks. We have also not checked which exams are currently schedulable at the test provider. Read 2026-07-30.

Related

• What changed recently across certifications

Sources

• Fortinet Training Institute - NSE programme expansion, read 2026-07-30: https://helpdesk.training.fortinet.com/support/solutions/articles/73000665750-how-will-the-nse-program-be-expanded-from-5-levels-to-8-levels-
• Fortinet Training Institute - existing certifications, read 2026-07-30: https://helpdesk.training.fortinet.com/support/solutions/articles/73000665774-what-will-happen-to-my-existing-certifications-and-which-new-certification-will-i-receive-on-july-15
• Fortinet Training Institute - exam transition mapping, read 2026-07-30: https://helpdesk.training.fortinet.com/support/solutions/articles/73000667144
• Fortinet Training Institute - new and discontinued exam release notices, read 2026-07-30: https://helpdesk.training.fortinet.com/support/solutions/articles/73000659982-nse-exam-release-notices-new-and-discontinued-exams

Citation Ledger