My certification journey

Hi everyone

I thought today I would start to share my experience as I attempt to travel down the road to Esri certification…

This morning I sat my ArcGIS Desktop Associate exam here in Brisbane. I had taken the plunge and signed up on the Pearson Vue website a couple of weeks ago and today was the day!

I had a moment yesterday when I realised that I haven’t really been using ArcGIS Desktop on a daily basis (my new Training Manager role has taken on a lot more spreadsheets than maps!)  so I was keen to brush up on my skills before hand, just to make sure there wasn’t any gaping holes in my knowledge. To do this I went to the certification site and printed out the list of skills that were going to be tested. I then went through the list and ticked off the ones that I was pretty sure I would be OK with and investigated the ones that I thought I better brush up on (or hadn’t actually heard of!). For example one of the skills measured was - ‘Describe the components used to create a data-driven page‘  - this is a tool that I hadn’t had a chance to play with yet, so I went to the tool help and read up on what it is all about (FYI it is very cool).

So what did I think? Well I found the exam challenging however I felt that it did do a good job of testing my actual experience with the software, rather than just having to remember where particular buttons were! So fingers crossed for me and I will keep you updated with my results……although now that I think about it I might reassess that promise when I find out

Before I go I read something of interest to this topic on the Esri facebook page this morning – they have developed two new training courses specifically designed at helping people prepare to sit the ArcGIS Desktop Associate and ArcGIS Desktop Professional exams. More details can be found at the Esri Training Blog. This is obviously something that we are keen to provide and I will keep you updated with any new information.

Thanks guys

Dominique