A sampling of certified Acrobat 8 experts

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Alvin Zhang is a trainer at 3dsense Media School and ACE Training in Singapore, providing training in Adobe Acrobat, Flash and Photoshop. He recently passed the full-blown certification exam for Acrobat 8. He says preparing for the exam forced him to explore some capabilities he doesn't use frequently or know as well.

"I think the exam helps to highlight portions of the software that you rarely use if it is not part of your job or workflow, and makes you go through them thoroughly and understand them," Zhang says. "I would not have read too deeply into the print workflow in Acrobat before, since I don't do press printing. Getting certified also instills greater confidence in my students who learn from me."

Jane Erickson is a Production Systems Analyst with XEROX Corporation, whose job in a nutshell is to "help integrate our printers into the customer's workflows." She frequently helps customers "determine the best 'job options' to create PDFs and how to print from PDFs."

"My customers are extremely color conscious and need to match Pantones as closely as possible," Erickson says. "Many work exclusively with the Adobe products." That includes creating and using a lot of PDF files, so she recently took and passed the Acrobat 8 ACE exam, which she describes as "challenging." ACE certification makes her a more valuable asset, she says.

"Mainly from my customers' perspective, I need to know as much as I can about PDF creation," says Erickson. "My customers work with different applications and the versions change that it is hard for anyone to keep up on a thorough understanding of an application, so my expertise just makes me more valuable and helpful to my customers and also my company."

Jon Bessant is an Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor in Acrobat 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 along with LiveCycle Designer, InDesign and InCopy, working for UK-based Certitec. He's been working with Acrobat and PDF since 1992 in the creative and print environments.

Having taken so many different certification exams, Bessant has a unique perspective on how the current Acrobat ACE exam compares to past versions.

"The Acrobat 8 exam has a family feeling, the Acrobat family that is," he says. "Previous ACE exams really got down to the nitty gritty (looking back there were a lot less features, but more details required). Acrobat 8 encompasses not only Acrobat itself, but includes questions on Acrobat Connect and other areas affecting Acrobat and PDF--such as transparency from the CS suite, for example. In general, you must know quite a lot about everything, but not granular detail."

Bessant says the range of benefits to continuing his lengthy accreditation includes "professional recognition, use of the Adobe logo, ability to partner with Adobe and the possibility of extending your certification to ACI and ACP status."

He offers a few tips to would-be exam takers:

• Understand the Acrobat family: Go to the Acrobat part of Adobe.com
• Make sure the use both Mac and Windows: Some features are dramatically different on each system
• Read the Help guide/system: Even if only to try and catch yourself out with different terminologies
• Get a trial account with Acrobat Connect
• Visit the Acrobat Adobe user-to-user forum, but do not get too involved: Look from afar and pick-up tips
• Read the Adobe Press Classroom-in-a-Book and study with ElementK, Total Training or Lynda.com
• Explore features you are not familiar with: Do not think your speciality area will take you through
• Enjoy: Even if you fail, you can take the exam again and you'll be more experienced. It took me three attempts to pass the Livecycle Designer exam

Karl Heinz Kremer is a software engineer with the Eastman Kodak Company. He's been working with Acrobat since version 3.0, but only became certified with the latest version.

"We are using Acrobat as the basis for a software product that is implemented as a number of Acrobat plug-ins," he says. "Acrobat was selected because it already brings a tremendous amount of functionality with it, and it is relatively easy to enhance its capabilities by writing custom plug-ins."

With such a specialized use and interest, he had to carefully review a lot of product features that he doesn't typically take advantage of for his job.

"Acrobat is such a powerful application that one usually only uses a tiny fraction of the features available," he says. "Things that we don't use on a daily basis are easily forgotten, so it was a good exercise for me to go through all the menus and toolbuttons again and remind myself of how many different applications Acrobat can be used for."

His Acrobat expertise is already known and appreciated by his colleagues, he says, so taking the exam was more for his own fulfillment. "It was mainly to prove to myself that I indeed know the application," he says. "As a side effect, the certification probably does not look too bad on my resume."

He offers the following advice on prepping to take the Acrobat 8 exam:

"I don't think you can pass the exam by just studying for the exam. You need a good working knowledge of how Acrobat is used in different workflows (e.g. document creation, interactive forms, document reviews and so on). Make yourself familiar with the user interface. Don't just know where to click, or which menu to use. Remember and recognize all the toolbuttons on the toolbars. Know the exact text of menu items."

Cynthia Rudy is president of C Graphics, which provides customized courses and project-management solutions for corporations. She's worked with Acrobat since version 1.0 and has been certified since version 3.0. She says the current Acrobat ACE test is noticeably improved from previous iterations.

"This exam was written so much better than the other Acrobat exams," she says. "I found that it asked a good variety of questions and was not asking trick questions or obscure questions that most people--even if they know Acrobat very well--could not answer without looking up some details."

Rudy says that the key benefits to being certified as an Acrobat expert include "being listed as a Certified trainer on Adobes site and being able to display the certification logo on my website and business cards."

She suggests the following to anyone planning to take the Acrobat 8 exam:

"Practice, take screen shots, look at the practice exam on Adobes website, watch a webinar on the new features of Acrobat 8, and memorize what is in each drop-down menu."