Acronis is betting big on the future of MSP education — and it’s raising the bar with a college-level certification program built for today’s frontline IT pros. The new MSP Academy Pro program, launched in 2025, offers vendor-neutral courses on topics like cybersecurity, business continuity, and advanced networking — complete with live instruction, hands-on labs, and exams proctored to college standards.
It’s the latest step in a much longer journey. Acronis’ investment in MSP training began more than a decade ago with its popular Acronis Academy, a certification program designed to deepen the partner relationship with Acronis and support their business growth.
What surprised said Acronis Senior Director of Education Jon McCarrick was how eager MSPs were to learn. “If a partner is required to do four certifications, they’ll usually do eight. If they’re only required to do one, we’ll see them complete five or six.”
Jon McCarrick
But despite this enthusiasm for learning, early on, some partners expressed pessimism when asked about their growth potential.
“When we’d walk into partner meetings and ask how we could help them grow, they’d often say, ‘You can’t,'” said McCarrick.
The Training Problem and the Acronis Solution
Those MSPs believed that two major problems made growth impossible for them:
- The technician talent gap. Even if an IT business hires a talented engineer, that person has limited throughput. If you try to push them past their limits, they stress out and make mistakes. When service quality suffers, business growth stops.
- Their technical background narrowed their business development skills. Without sales and marketing expertise, they didn’t know how to expand their client base. Even when they could afford to outsource sales and marketing, they lacked the knowledge to evaluate third-party vendors and validate that those vendors were delivering on their promises.
To directly address these pain points, Acronis launched its MSP Academy in October 2023 with a dual-track approach:
- The tech onboarding track covers MSP fundamentals, customer service, troubleshooting, and basic tech concepts — like AV, EDR, XDR, backup, RMM, and ticketing.
- The business foundations track tackles entrepreneurial challenges. Examples include transitioning from break/fix to managed services, constructing an effective tech stack, sales fundamentals, practical marketing strategies, and event planning.
Advanced MSP Training: The Path Forward
As the academy evolved, Acronis identified an even more complex need that was hindering business growth. Some senior technicians are adept at performing complex tasks but don’t understand the technical concepts that underpin those tasks. In other words, they get the “how” but not the “why.”
This drove the creation of a paid version, MSP Academy Pro in 2025. It’s a college-level, vendor-neutral curriculum calibrated to the world that MSPs navigate daily.
In addition to its current compliance and cybersecurity program, the Pro version will eventually include MSP training on hot topics like advanced networking, server management, business continuity, disaster recovery, and more.
Notably, Acronis is working to partner with academic institutions to translate these industry credentials into formal college credits. That will standardize the educational pathway for new MSP professionals, something the industry desperately needs.
The Pro version is currently priced at $329 per course, with an introductory 50% discount offered to early participants. Once all eight courses in the Pro track are released, Acronis plans to offer bundled pricing for the full certification series. That will provide an even more affordable path for professional development.
Preparing for Tomorrow’s Challenges
McCarrick emphasized that because the world is changing at light speed, every industry needs educational resources to keep up. MSP training is no exception. His biggest short-term advice? “Become an AI expert. Internally first, then for your clients.”
When developing MSP Academy Pro, McCarrick’s team embraced that desire to innovate. Artificial intelligence played a major role in drafting curriculum content and producing both foreign language translations and voiceovers. McCarrick connected that passion for learning and leveraging new technology with the crises MSPs face daily.
“There’s going to be a breach,” he said. “That’s not a question. What matters is whether or not your team knows how to respond. Education is everything.”
Images: Acronis
