Last month, I attended the Adobe Learning Summit in Las Vegas and was part of the second cohort to gain the Adobe Captivate Specialist Certification. Since returning, several people have asked about the process of gaining the certification, so I’ve decided to share some of the Q&A. If you’re thinking of taking the certification, my hope is that there might be something useful in here for you too.

Q: How did you find out about it?

It was advertised on the Adobe Captivate product site.
There’s a similar advertisement posted today. You can find the Adobe Captivate Specialist certification by following the instructions below.

To locate the Adobe Captivate Specialist information:

1. Locate the call-to-action is for the Adobe e-Learning Conference –it’s a thin banner just below the main image.
2. Click the Register Now link to open the conference registration page.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page.

Q: Who else was there?

There were around 400 people taking the certification exam, but many more attended the free Learning Summit on day 2. Plus, there were a large number of Adobe employees.

I was impressed to see the Captivate software developers assisting instructors in the Refresher classes. My particular cohort was taught by Dr. Pooja Jaisingh! It was really great to meet her in person after taking the online course (which she created and teaches).

As for the attendees, I found myself taking the exam alongside many long-time users like myself (the early adopters), and a few intermediate users. I never personally met any beginners.

Q: What was the process like?

I think this is best described in terms of a timeline…

Day 0: Register for the conference. Receive an automated verification with a link to conference-rate hotel reservations.

Two weeks before the conference: Receive an invitation to take the online pre-certification refresher course in Captivate Prime. The course covers all major functionality within Adobe Captivate –including new features released in Captivate 2019. Content is divided over 20 chapters, each consisting of short modules.

Personal note: The course was assigned an estimated length of 7.5 hours; I believe this is the running time of all the videos combined. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything important, so I completed all the exercises. I worked through most of them pretty fast, but it still took over 20 hours to complete the course.  I would highly recommend taking the time to do this as I personally found the experience to be very worthwhile. I refreshed a lot of old knowledge, learned some new things, and eventually sat the exam feeling very well-prepared.

Of course, at the time, I was also under the impression that completion of the course was mandatory since there were credits assigned to each module –I was uncertain whether they counted towards the certification and I wanted to err on the side of caution.

At the conference however, I learned that many participants had not completed the pre-certification course –so it wasn’t mandatory! I’m not sure how those people fared on the exam though. I would say, “better to be safe than sorry.”

One to Two Weeks before the conference: Receive regular automated email reminders from the Captivate Prime LMS urging completion of the course prior to attending the conference.

Adobe Learning Summit Day One: Attend an all-day refresher class; sit the Captivate Certification exam at the end of the day. The exam is open-book, a passing score is 70% or more. There are no retakes permitted on the day.

Adobe Learning Summit Day Two: Attend the conference and workshops; receive your framed Captivate Specialist certificate (assuming you passed the exam), and have your photo taken by a professional photographer (free of charge, courtesy of Adobe). The photographer emails a soft copy of your photo to you almost immediately.

Approximately 10 days after the Summit: Adobe sends a soft copy of your certificate via email, as well as a link to your credential validation ephemera on Cred.ly (more details in my response to the next question).

Q: What did you get?

• Framed and soft copies of the certificate;
• A photo taken by a professional photographer (see the thumbnail image for this post);
• A soft copy of a Captivate Specialist tag for my website, business cards, and such;
• A link to Cred.ly that can be posted on websites or shared via Social Media. Recipients can just click to verify the credentials.  In case you’d like to try this out, the image below is a link to my credential –please feel free to click it to see what happens!

How often is it offered?

Adobe currently offers the certification twice a year –in the Spring in Washington, D.C. and in the Fall in Las Vegas, Nevada. This article states that it was first offered in Spring 2018.