Got the email response telling me that I had passed, and they’d be in touch with the details of the certification stuff. I’m glad to get that behind me before the end of the year.
It is a pretty rigorous certification. You have to apply, telling them some details of how you use Summation, ho you plan to train on it etc. Once your application is approved, you have to pass a pre-workshop exam. Once you do that, then you have to go out to one of their offices for the 3 day workshop. (4 days if you’re going for the WebBlaze as well as iBlaze Certifcation).
After that workshop you have 75 days to pass parts one and two of the exam, at which point you’ll be given the hands on project. Part 1 is 50 multiple choice questions, and was pretty similar to the A+ exam I took awhile back in terms of how it’s laid out. One big difference, of course, is that you take it online, so it’s open book for all purposes, and it’s not timed at all. You can work on it, stop, and go back as long as you want.
Part 2 is 10 short essay questions. These take a little more time but, again, you can start, stop and go back as often as you need to. Short essay questions are a bit tougher, you don’t see those in Tech exams very often, simply because someone has to grade them! In the case of CT Summation, though, they are typically only dealing with the 15 people from the latest workshop at any one time, and I think they maybe do 4-5 workshops per year?
Part 3 was a hands-on project. The idea is to take a case database and follow the directions to do the various work that they require to show that you know you’re way around the database and the various features. After all, you can’t really use Summation if you can’t bring data in, make it usable for the attorneys and then get it back out when needed!
Overall, I’d say that while it’s certainly a very specific certification, (If your firm doesn’t use Summation, there’s not much point unless you plan to become a free-lance trainer.) the rigors of the testing process and the relative lack of large numbers of SCT’s out in the field make it a pretty good indicator for skills in using Summation, and that’s really the whole point!
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