In April 2020, I took the eJPT exam from eLearnSecurity. As the “Junior” part of the name suggests, this is an entry level exam, and I think it acts as a good stepping stone towards the eCPPT or the OSCP.
All of eLearnSecurity’s certifications are good for life, as opposed to Cisco/CompTIA certifications which have to be renewed every 3 years; however, they update the syllabus every so often, so eJPTv2 has now replaced the original eJPT (which I did).
This was my third penetration testing exam, and it took an interesting approach. PenTest+ is a traditional theory based exam, where you answer multiple choice questions and then a computer instantly gives you the result when you finish. OSWP is a practical exam, where I had to submit a written report and wait for a human to review it. In the eJPT exam, you are given VPN access to a network, and then you have to answer multiple choice questions based on that network. For instance, they might ask you “How many Windows services are configured for automatic startup on SERVER1?” The only way to find out is to gain access to that server, i.e. you have to actually use the skills that you’ve learnt rather than regurgitating trivia points from memory. I think this approach gives the best of both worlds, i.e. a practical test with instant results, although reports are an important skill for real-life penetration tests.
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