To improve sales efficiency & predictability with a consistent and scalable customer engagement, the Field Enablement Team is developing a role based certification program that includes functional, soft skills, and product training for field team members.
The Certifications will align to the customer journey and the field functional competencies that address the critical knowledge, skills, role-based behaviors, processes, content, and tools to successfully execute customer engagements.
Note: This certification program is different from resources like other GitLab certifications that focus on how to use GitLab or tied to GitLab competencies (though we encourage field team members to take these as well)!
Certification programs allow us to validate GitLab skills and knowledge, recognize individual mastery, and motivate continuous learning and skills growth all aligned to expectation setting and performance discussions.
The goal of the Field Certification Program is to validate that:
The Field Certification Program will include functional and soft skills training for:
During Sales Quick Start, every GitLab field team member is trained on customer value drivers and GitLab’s value-based messaging framework (see the Command of the Message page). In addition, GitLab field team members and partners are introduced to GitLab’s customer use cases.
With the customer in mind, learning will be focused on helping field team member create engagements with a customer that make a lasting emotional impression. The foundation of this approach is based on the concept explained in "Blueprints for a SAAS Sales Organization: How to Design, Build and Scale a Customer Centric Sales Orgnization" by Jacob Van Der Kooj and Fernando Pizarro.
Please note: Processes continue to mature and evolve. To see that latest, please check out the slide below.
Course content will be a combination of handbook pages, YouTube videos, and interactive content delivered through the new Learning Experience Platform (LXP). This new system is not intended to replace the Handbook as the single source of truth, and instead will serve to curate content from a variety of sources and provide a guided tour of curated content for the learner.
To achieve GitLab “certified” status, candidates must complete both the online written exam (knowledge) and practical assessment (skill) with a passing score on each exam.
This is a roadmap of what is coming up, but do not wait to be assigned courses. You can search and consume courses on your own schedule by searching in GitLab Learn our learning experience platform.
Additional deeper dive customer use case training focused on how to sell GitLab will be made available to field team members and partners and include the below elements:
The GitLab use cases help define the categories of related features with a business value narrative. In other words, why are customers buying GitLab and what do they think that we offer. You can read more about each of our use cases by navigating to the Product navigation menu at the top of this page or from anywhere on about.gitlab.com.
There are also resources available to cater to the size of customer and their needs.
Currently available courses include the following:
To get involved or follow along with the development, check out the Field Certification Issues Board. We love feedback and questions, so check us out on Slack in #field-cert-program.
