Creating the world’s first Chaos Engineering Technology Certification
For a while now, I have been really passionate about the idea of creating the world’s first Chaos Engineering certification. There is a lot of information I wanted to help everyone learn and understand. I also like the idea of providing a reward in the form of a certificate for completing an exam. I’m a big fan of education, my mum really instilled this in me at a young age.
“Your education is something that nobody can take away from you” — my mum
TL;DR
We launched the world’s first Chaos Engineering Certification. This was my first time creating a technical certification. In the first 7 weeks of the launch of the Gremlin Certified Chaos Engineering Practitioner Certification, we had 5000 enrollments and 1000 certificates issues (1/5 people pass the exam).
How did we build this certification program?
Firstly, I started with creating a set of examination questions and answers. I thought through all of the things I’d like someone to know if I was going to hire them to practice Chaos Engineering alongside me. This was a foundation-level exam and I wanted it to include all the must-have knowledge. I drafted up the exam questions in a google doc along with the answers and asked a few of my colleagues from different teams across Gremlin to do a review. Don Darwin in particular had great feedback and contributed extra questions which extended the exam length.
Picking the technology platforms for the certification
The examination platform
- We are using Coassemble for the exam platform. This platform was actually initially chosen for a different use case — Jason Yee and Ana Medina were looking into using it to create online learning courses. I had a look at this platform and thought it was a good choice for my examination needs, it’s got a nice modern UI and it was easy to have users self-enroll. It’s also an Australian startup based out of Newcastle and I’m Australian so it’s nice to support mates downunder.
The credential platform
- We are using Accredible for the certificates that users get when they successfully pass the exam (you need 80% or higher to pass). I really liked a lot of the features that Accredible provides; great options for the aesthetics of your certificates, easy ability to add your certificate to your LinkedIn profile, easy ability to share your certificate to LinkedIn, easy posting of your certificate to Twitter, you can easily email your certificate to your manager or you can download it to keep.
Hooking up the examination and credential platforms
- There isn’t an out-of-the-box integration so we had to add this ourselves. The APIs for both Coassemble and Accredible are great — you can easily have these APIs work well with each other. What I did was add a condition that when a user passes the exam (gets 80%) this data is then sent over to the Accredible API to create a credential. We decided to send emails using our mailserver rather than Accredible’s mailserver to ensure we’d be able to reach inboxes. When you get your credential you get an email with a link to your certificate.
Customer review and insights
After setting up the end-to-end certification platform, I then asked several of our customers to review the exam and provide feedback. I wanted to know the answer to a few questions:
- Is the exam too easy, too hard, or just right?
- Do you agree that the questions and answers are the correct level of knowledge for a practitioner exam (foundation level)?
- What is your feedback on the platform we are using?
Overall the feedback was that the exam should be a little harder, so I worked with Don to make it a bit more complicated and removed any questions that were deemed too easy by our customers.
Getting ready for launch day
I worked with Alex Drag to prepare for launch day. He created a messaging doc and a really nice landing page that you can see here: gremlin.com/certification.
On launch day we posted on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter & YouTube) and we sent emails out to our customers and folks who’d asked to get updates from us as we launch new initiatives.
Additional supportive resources:
- We created a github repo full of resources to help everyone prepare to take the exam: https://github.com/gremlin/certificate-study-guide/
- We hosted a prep session one week after the launch: https://www.gremlin.com/webinars/gremlin-certificate-prep-session/
What’s happening next?
We’re currently working on the next level of the certification program and plan to launch this shortly. Share in the comments what topics you’d like to see covered or reach out to Julie directly https://twitter.com/Julie_Gund. Can’t wait to see everyone receive their 2nd Chaos Engineering certificate!
