Hey Dennis,
Lauren reached out to me about your question, which is definitely a good one. I've been heading up the certification and e-learning development on cPanel University for a little while now, and the primary reason that we set the expirations to be the same timeframe is what you've already indicated; we simply want to make sure that, despite the fact that a year has passed, users and admins are still brought fully back up to speed on what the product, in full, contains.
I initially worked as a cPanel Support Analyst for a few years, and prior to that gave support for cPanel servers while employed with major server providers. By the time I shifted to training, I felt like I could comfortably declare myself as having mastered the product, inside and out. What quickly became apparent though, as I began putting together material for different components and features, was that my experience with support did not in fact give me exposure to every aspect of the product as I had expected. There were a surprising amount of components that I realized that I had
not actually dealt with in any significant frequency, or was not as innately familiar with as I would have expected.
Looking over past tickets and considering it a bit further, it was fairly clear in retrospect that the vast majority of support tickets that are submitted tend to revolve around a few major segments of the software that are most prominent for many customers. Relying solely on this experience gave me a bit of an isolated perspective of what the product was. As a result, when establishing the certification material, one of our goals was to try and represent the product more fully, while still trying to specifically target areas that the most users would find the most value in. With that ultimately being the goal, it made sense to necessitate a periodic refresher of the material.
All of that said, there is definitely a distinctive difference that could lead to the kind of frustration that you're describing, specifically in
one of the courses: cPanel Professional. We've gotten great feedback on the use of the video-based learning medium for this content, and it made sense to go that route when looking at the product from the individual account-level interface. However, it is a significant time investment in which self-pacing is not as easily achieved as it might be on the other courses.
What I'd like to do, and what we'll likely be implementing either in Q4 this year or in early 2021, is to create the missing certification
exam for the cPanel Professional course, and allow renewal users to simply take the test to confirm that they're still familiar with the areas of the software covered by that course. As you've noticed it seems, though, with the duplicate questions, perfecting an exam that provides us with a fully reliable representation of a user's comprehension is not always straightforward, so we want to make sure we get it right.
We're also in the process of doing major revisions to the CWA and CWSA-I exams (and quizzes, for that matter) to ensure that users don't encounter any more out of place questions, duplicates, or ambiguous phrasing.
With all of the above in mind, I think the value of renewing familiarity with the product on a broad scale is still a valuable thing. It's been an objective of mine, though, to try and take responsibility for users' experiences when going through the material, and if it feels like a chore, then it's our responsibility to try and address that. I suspect that the changes I mentioned previously, involving the exam/quiz revisions, the addition of a CPP certification exam, as well as the platform changes that we're working on, will be a step in the right direction.
I'm not at all closed off to suggestions or feedback on any of this, however. If you have anything you'd like to propose or discuss in regards to this, let me know - it's certainly something I think about a lot, so I've got plenty of opinions on it.
Last but not least, if you do notice any odd question behavior in the exams down the road, always feel free to let us know at
[email protected]. We often try to address those kinds of issues on-the-spot as they are reported, along with the major review/revision pushes throughout the year.
Thank you!
Ryan Robson
@cPanelRyan on
Discord
