My thoughts on the Contentful Certification

I recently passed the Contentful certification, and became a "certified professional". I want to share my thoughts about the exam and recommendations on what to study to pass the exam. Please remember that the following reflects the conditions when I took the exam (winter 2021) and things might have changed.

The Contentful Training Center

Contentful has its own training center, training.contentful.com. It gives you access to courses, consisting of text, interactive images, videos and knowledge checks. The content is good, short pieces of text describes features and concepts, and videos show how to work with them. There is some overlap in the different courses, but its easy skip through. However, it is quite difficult to get an overview of the available material in the training center. There are activities, paths and courses, and its difficult to find the way back to where you were.

I went throught an activity called Contentful Essentials. It has paths for developers, content modelers and content authors. Since I wanted to be prepared for the exam, I took all three paths. The courses in the paths are good, but sometimes too basic. Being a developer, I especially liked the developer courses, since they showcased specific Contentful features. There are excellent videos on how to setup approval flows, configure webhooks, etc.

Contentful Developer Documentation

There is also technical documentation available at contentful.com/developers/docs/. The documentation includes API references, videos showing features and more. Since the exam is said to be not only for developers, but also for project managers and content architects, I did not study the developer documentation as much as I would have wished. In retrospect, the exam contained quite many technical questions that are covered by these docs.

The exam

• 50 questions
• 75 minutes
• 70 % score needed to pass
• "closed-book", no notes or google allowed

You are presented with one question at a time and you can't go back to change your answers! Your score is presented to you directly after submitting the last question.

The exam was more difficult than I anticipated. I thought the questions were gonna be as difficult as the knowledge checks in the training courses, or should I say as easy as the knowledge checks... I was wrong.

The exam does contain some easy questions, however, there are a lot of questions on details, for example on the capabilities of the Contentful CLI and the SLAs.

To make things even more difficult, there are a lot of questions where you should select all the correct answers out of the four alternatives, and the alternatives are slightly rephrased from what you have seen before.

Summary

Don't be fooled by the easy knowledge checks. Prepare for technical questions by spending more time reading the developer documentation, but make sure to go through some training courses, especially if you are lacking content model experience.