This week SAP Education launched SAP Certification Crowd Authoring Program. With this program SAP hopes to attract certified SAP consultants to co-author questions for future certification exams. It is the first time SAP tries to outsource development of SAP certification material to external experts. In this post we will tell you what this program is about, how you can participate in it, and how you can benefit from your participation.
What is SAP Certification Crowd Authoring Program?
Traditionally, SAP treated its certification program as extremely internal process. They wanted to have a complete control over the tests and their delivery. One of the main reasons for this situation were the fear of leaking SAP certification questions to the Internet and the desire to control profitable SAP training and education business. However, it seems that SAP Education came to understanding of the fact that by keeping SAP certification program secretly internal they cannot match the increasingly fast pace of new trends in SAP training and education. Therefore, they decided to create SAP Certification Crowd Authoring Program. This program encourages consultants who hold an SAP certification to contribute to developing new exams by submitting questions (with answers). According to the statement made by SAP Education, the main goal of this program is to further enhance SAP certification tests and keep up with SAP technology and project experience by including valuable expertise and insight from experienced and certified individuals in the global SAP community.
How to Participate?
It is easy to participate in SAP Certification Crowd Authoring Program. However, there are certain limitation on the profiles of the authors. Here are the prerequisites for participation:
- You need to be certified SAP consultant.
- You need to have extensive experience in the SAP area to which you submit the questions.
- You need SAP S-User id. Read this post to find out how to obtain one.
- You need to accept SAP non-disclosure agreement and their terms and conditions.
If you fulfill these prerequisites, then you should go to https://training.sap.com/v2/crowdsourcing/, login with your S-User, and submit your first question.
What are the Benefits?
Are you expecting financial benefits from participation in this program? You should not. By submitting questions you will be earning virtual points (they are called SAP Certification Author credits). The points can be used achieve bronze, silver or gold statuses. Also, SAP hints that the points can be exchanged to free certification vouchers but no detailed information has been provided so far.
Overall, SAP Certification Crowd Authoring Program looks like a very interesting initiative. Time will show how successful it will be. Have you already tried participating in this program? Share your experience in the comments section below!