My journey through ServiceNow's Certified Technical Architect (CTA) Program
I just recently finished my journey through ServiceNow's Certified Technical Architect (CTA) program. I have seen and heard a lot of interest in this certification program, and I wanted to share my experience so you’ll know what to expect if you choose to take this course.
If you don't know what the CTA program is, let me give you a quick overview. It’s an expert-level certification, and it’s very technical. While it isn't quite at the Master Certified Architect level, think of it as the more technically savvy younger brother. The three-month program takes a flipped-classroom approach where students complete self-paced learning, work on case studies in study groups, and complete a peer-reviewed presentation as a capstone project to become certified.
This course really focuses on the delivery piece, such as platform design and governance, and less on sales. So, if the sales side of the house isn't your thing, and you geek out over techy stuff, then this is for you!!!
Now let me share my experience.
The course is 13 weeks long, and all 13 weeks are challenging to say the least. It’s broken down into three self-paced, on-demand courses. These courses are further broken down into two categories: theory and practical. Theory covers project, project management, architectural, and technical governance topics. Examples include application design patterns and agile frameworks. Practical covers topics in design, build, and unit testing, such as instance data replication and CSDM. There’s a biweekly quiz, as well as a weekly case study that covers that week's material. There’s also one overall use case: a fictional global company about to start implementation of ServiceNow.
At the beginning of the course, you will be broken down into different study groups. For the next three months, your study group will become like family. My group was made up of other ServiceNow employees and ecosystem partners. That was done by design so that we could expand our network and knowledge. You will still interact and learn from other groups, but your study group is where you will create a bond with like-minded ServiceNow experts. I learned so much from my group’s experiences and knowledge. Without them, I wouldn’t have passed this course. My group is the one thing I liked most about this course. We still talk nearly every day.
The weekly case studies are where you will spend most of your time. Your team will solve each case study, and you also have to present and defend it during a weekly virtual collaboration session. At the end of the week, all the groups meet up virtually, and random teams are picked to present the case study. Our virtual collaboration session was each Friday, and the new coursework went live after the session. I was doing all of this while still working my full-time job.
They treat the case study as a real-world implementation. You won’t get line-by-line instructions on how to create the presentation for the case study. This is where your experience and your teammates' experience come into play. You have to talk it out and come up with an approach to solve and present the issue in the case study. This is the difficult part and will push you out of your comfort zone. I will tell you right now—THERE IS NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER. Go with what makes sense and be able to defend it. When you present, the other groups will provide feedback, good or bad. You’ll be surprised that the other groups usually come to the same or a similar conclusion. Another piece of advice I can give you is to keep it SIMPLE. There will be a LOT of brainpower in your group, and you will go down technical rabbit holes. Step back and remember the case study and the audience. We didn't get that piece of advice till later in the course, and it could have saved my team some late nights.
The final thing you have to do is an individual capstone presentation on the overall use case. Again, there are no step-by-step instructions on what your presentation should be. It’s just you and an evaluator, who takes on the persona of an executive-level client in order to simulate a real-world experience. The evaluator will also ask questions from the CTA program that aren’t in your presentation. While you aren't expected to be a walking knowledge base of the stuff you learned, you must understand it at a high level.
My best advice is to be yourself and present things you are comfortable with. Practice with dry runs, build a time buffer for questions, and pick a familiar topic. The weekly collaboration sessions give you presentation experience, so by the time you get to this point, you’ll have already mastered the art of creating a slide deck to effectively communicate something very technical to high-level executives in plain terms.
After the course had finished and I had some time to reflect on it, I came up with some takeaways.
Going into the class, I felt intimidated and questioned my skill level. I was about to start a course with the best technical architects from different companies around the world. Was I at that level? I was experiencing impostor syndrome. However, as I worked my way through the program, I realized I had all that knowledge and experience from the different projects had I worked on. And when I started to see other teams present and defend their solutions, I realized that we all had the same train of thought. We had the same reasons to come to those similar solutions. That built my confidence, and I quickly realized I did belong in the group.
I also learned how to organize this knowledge and experience into industry standards and frameworks. Once you start doing this, you can start to see how everything ties together. You begin to get that "aha" moment.
And my soft skills improved by leaps and bounds. In my current role, I am no stranger to presenting, but this course taught me to communicate a technical message that makes sense and shows value or solves a problem. It also showed me how to compress that message and cut out the fluff, and how to express my technical thoughts to the general public when I need to.
I really enjoyed the CTA program and highly recommend it to anyone looking to take their ServiceNow knowledge to the next level. It’s entirely different from the other classes that ServiceNow offers, which are typically about one subject and geared toward passing a certification. This program is about growing professionally as an architect and in a wide area of ServiceNow subjects. It’s also about learning from your group and sharing and building on your experiences. It’s improved my technical and architectural skills and given me a confidence boost and sanity check I couldn't have gotten without the program.
My final words of advice if you go down this path is this: trust your team and yourself. And expect to devote some time to this course. IT WILL NOT BE EASY. If it were, everyone would be doing it! There is nothing that can prepare you for this program, but a lot of what you will need will come from your personal experiences and your study team's experiences.
This class elevated me professionally, added to my toolbox, fine-tuned my skills, and cementing me as a real ServiceNow technical expert. I would do it again in a heartbeat.
Good luck with your journey.
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