A new exam was launched in April for all the Office 365 / SharePoint user adoption specialists out there. It’s so great to have a non technical exam available again for business users. Here’s the blurb from edX :

This is a course for professionals who are accountable for or learning how to drive the adoption of Microsoft services in their organization.  You are not required to have a prior education in organizational change management to participate in this course.  We will help you to learn the essential skills required to craft and execute a service adoption plan.  This course is appropriate for business leaders, IT professionals, change managers or others interested in maximizing their value from technology in their business. In this course we will use the implementation of Microsoft Teams as our example service.  Our framework is designed to be applicable to any service you may be implementing however the technical acumen section will be specific to Microsoft Teams.  All required information will be contained in this course.  If you’d like to go deeper in the technical implementation of Microsoft Teams we recommend our Enabling Teamwork with Microsoft Teams course. 

So naturally I jumped right in and took the test. I am happy to report that I passed with 93% with the first attempt!

The final exam is a bit tricky. I was doing so well till then…. I got 3 wrong in total. One was just a rookie mistake, one I did get wrong, and one I am contesting cos I don’t agree with their answer. 😀 I suppose 93% will just have to do. 🙂

There are two options, a free version where you can practice the exam. Or a paid version where you can get a certificate is you pass, the passmark is 70%. The are 60 questions across 4 assessments and a final exam. 50% of your score comes from the 4 assessments, and 50% from your final exam. The paid version is $99 on the site, but you do get a discount code on signing up, so the certified version will cost you $79,20.

You can go back into your course at anytime to carry on with it and view the status on your dashboard and progress page, (above).

It’s a very cool exam but you have to concentrate on what you’re reading. If you are in the adoption / change management game already, you should be able to answer most of the questions off the bat without too much trouble. There are just some specific to their scenario you need to pay attention to. Read the questions carefully! I did this course over a couple of days at first, then finished it 2 weeks later, it took around 7 hours in total. I don’t recommend doing that. It would be better to start early on a Saturday morning and whack the whole thing one shot because you will lose your train of thought too easily. You get one month to complete the course before it expires and you have to pay again and I cannot tell you how fast that month goes. Don’t waste time if you plan on writing this exam, the questions can be very misleading if you aren’t paying attention.

Doesn’t matter how good you are at adoption / change management, you will definitely learn something on this course. There’s tons of free downloads with it that you can use at work too. Give it a shot. Good job Microsoft and our peers across the globe for putting this together :

Karuana Gatimu, David Johnson, Pouneh Kaufman, Heather Newman, Susan Hanley, Dux Raymond Sy, Robert Bogue, Jennifer Mason, Darryl Webster, Mike Graham, Sanjeevini Mattal, Christian Buckley, Sean Wilson, Corrine Martinez, Sarah Goodwin, Christian Maier, Jace Moreno, Erick Brechner, Brad Wright, Christian Wylde, Jeff Teper, Brian MacDonald.