How can CTA program help a person in 'REALITY'? How CTA can help a company?

[Samantha Sam]

How can CTA program help a person in 'REALITY'? Do they really gain 'ALL' the technical knowledge in depth? Will they be be able to help solve any technical challenges?

I have been working with ServiceNow over last 8 years. In every project we come across one or the other challenges/issues while implementing a the product/solution in areas like IntegrationHub, Adaptive authentication, Encryption, Service bridge, instance data replication, Integrations, debugging issues etc.

There are few CTAs in my company. Whenever we go to them and represent our problem, we dont get a solution immediately. They will say give me some time or give many links to community posts and even say to raise a support case.

==When seeking help to write a code or debug a code, they say they are not into in-depth scripting, they just can tell which approach to use (finally our fellow junior developers would only solve them)

==When we seek technical help for certain products like GRC, Now Assist, Virtual agent - the answer we get is 'I have not worked on that product' (so CTA is for particular ServiceNow product only?)

== For any operation issues, after hearing out the story completely, they say better to raise a support case.

We literally dont get any help from them.

Our only ServiceNow guru is "community". Most of our queries would already be posted by someone or once we post our question, we get a solution 😉

I and my juniors always keep wondering why do we need CTAs when we can do everything ourselves when we have google and chatgpt (ofcousre not blindly trusting it, we use our brains) 😄

[Uncle Rob]

If you're looking for an immediate solution to every single problem, then you're probably not going to find what you're looking for.  Given the CTA program only requires a fraction of the large number of CIS certs, its pretty clear they aren't meant to "know everything", if indeed anyone can at this point.

The CTA program emerged because the market was fed up with having no benchmark for credibility.  Half a decade of "of course this resource knows ServiceNow" only to have them be certified with zero field experience.  Or worse, someone with field experience but bad doctrine.  What the CTA course provides is advanced and ServiceNow blessed *doctrine* as well as a peer review of capabilities.  It isn't magic.

Sorry your experience with CTAs at your org has been bad.  Just remember...
- ChatGPT hallucinates all the time
- The community isn't billable

[Samantha Sam]

Hi Rob!

Thats the point I am still trying to understand - CTA program only requires a fraction of the large number of CIS certs. That person cannot know everything. In that case there should have been something like CTA-ITSM, CTA-GRC etc.

A customer will not have credibility on a service provider and give project to them when they say they have 'X' CTA's. There are many other factors to it which you know 🙂

Anyways, thanks for replying and thanks for sharing your knowledge on YouTube and LinkedIn. I have learnt a lot from you.

[Uncle Rob]

The CTA is not a "level 2 CIS".  The program is a whole lot broader than that.  I suggest you read up on it on NowLearning.

If you think there's no difference between a CTA cert and any other cert level, I don't know what to tell you.  The fact that CTA's are judged by a committee instead of an exam speaks volumes, and that's a level of experience the market has been craving for ... lets see... 15 years now.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @Samantha Sam 

I am not a CTA now a CMA but your point is valid and agree with @Uncle Rob as well. My views:

- CTA is a more advanced certification in the SN ecosystem which provides more insight about the platform.

- A CTA certified doesn't mean he/she knows everything at every time but giving an answer will put on community and also not 100% justified.

- As far as I heard, CTA will change the mindset to think about the platform/suctioning side.

I will say, that you can listen few podcasts / read some blogs to get more about CTA.