To start with, I am happy to complete learning and successfully pass both Content Hub Administrator and Developer Certification exams. In this post, I will try to share some thoughts and insights on how you could also progress with those two.
Everything started for me from this twit from the official Sitecore account:
With more and more large clients choosing Content Hub, I thought that would be a great time investment learning how to deal with it. To start with, one could start with the Content Hub sandbox which is intentionally done for acknowledgment and playing it over.
Documentation is free and available here: Sitecore Content Hub's Functional documentation.
There is an official learning collection for Content Hub 4 which comes as a 12-month on-demand digital learning subscription, however costly ($2k, unless you're a partner). Instead, I referred to the one for version 3 which became free at some point as well as lots of third-party resources and blogs.
Since Content Hub is a SaaS solution, one cannot install that in order to familiarize with it. Instead, you may need to spin up your own Sandbox Environment in order to practice. You may read what are the options by this link (also Sitecore MVPs get $50 off the bill).
When it comes to actual exams, it is
not possible to book either of both
directly from
Kryterion Webassesor - it will prompt you that both given exams are available as voucher-only exams. But no worries, that brings us to just another loop to the official study guides, which you purchase instead of the desired exam directly, at the same price as the exam ($350) and you'll be given an exam voucher valid for 3 months at the end of the study guide. This is an additional step but it makes sure you're on the right path and prevents you from giving an unsuccessful attempt: there will be a 10-question quiz at the end that mimics the exam question (in fact, way simplified than the real exam) which you have to answer at least 8 of 10 in order to progress with obtaining a voucher code. I would strongly discourage you from taking the exam unless you cover 10 of 10 and are strong in the competencies below.
If you're lucky to me Sitecore MVP (as I am), you'll get a generous discount of 75% off the price. Yes, you pay only a quarter:
You will have to answer 50 and 60 59 questions for the Administrator and Developer exam, correspondingly with a pass rate of 80%. This is a "closed book" proctored exam, which means during the course of the whole exam one cannot refer to any of the materials, notes, browser tabs, etc. A built-in laptop internal camera would be enough, but the proctor will be monitoring you all the time. They are ofter alerted when test-takers move their sight outside of the monitor and can put an exam on pause asking to turn the camera and show the whole environment to ensure no cheating takes place. Another cautious wearable is glasses (especially tinted) - those could be smart glasses and the proctor must ensure they aren't.
The Sitecore Content Hub Administrator Certification Study Guide talks about the competencies and the expectation on each area for the exam. If you follow this guide and cover all the areas mentioned you should be able to pass the exam.
- Schema Design
- UI Configuration: Search Component and Mass Edit
- Branding and Theme, Custom Home Pages
- Media Processing
- Digital Rights Management
- Data Import and Export
- Security: Basic and Advanced
- Reporting
- Enterprise Domain Model: Schema and Metadata Management
- UI and Advanced Pages
- Entity Printing
- Create and Configure a New Workflow
In addition to the above, there are Developer competencies added at Sitecore Content Hub Developer Certification Study Guide:
- Metadata Processing Scripts
- Develop External Page Components
- Develop Web-enabled Action Scripts
- Develop Triggers, Actions, and Action Scripts to Implement Custom Business Logic in Response to Entity Changes
- Implement User Sign-in Scripts 
- Develop LINQ Queries in Combination with Action Scripts that Run In-Process and Out-of-Process
Outside of official guidance, there are lots of third party helpful resources:
Finally, last but not the least, I'll share my own ideas and some interesting facts.
Firstly, both exams share the vast proportion of the same competencies up to 70% and at some moment it looks like the Administrator test is a subset of Developers one. Personally, I have met a certain amount of the same questions as a part of both exams. That means if you want to cover them both, it would be highly beneficial to start with the Administrator exam and once complete switch to Developers. But you don't have to - just choose the one that suits you best.
Next, the topics and competencies. Learn and understand the schema! The questions about it were widespread along with both tests. Without a bright and clear understanding of it, it becomes impossible passing these exams.
You must also know:
- how to define relation types and cardinality for the desired use case
- work with metadata and add new metadata properties
- option lists and how to use them with M.Asset
- taxonomies and all about them
- Search relevance and boosting
- full-text search and to configure new metadata for it
- how to set up security for the properties
- rules and conditional display fields to display, and understand scopes (ie. for Apply All vs Apply Any)
- exporting and importing (from Excel)
- what are DRM contracts and right profiles, how to apply those to assets
- anything related to workflows: state flow manager, etc.
- how to work with media: converting, streaming, or download, how to work with renditions
- how to implement custom logic triggered by entity changes
- context and getting data out of it
- the difference between action scripts that run in-process and out of the process
- how to implement authentication-related code (ie. checking the way user got authenticated, local or external)
I found nice guides from
Navan in a form of a walkthrough:
.. and some other useful resources:
That is just a small subset of what you expected to be confident with in order to successfully pass the exam (
the last four bullets relate to the Developer exam only). Speaking about the Developer exam, please pay attention to the
Scripting API Examples section, as some of the codebase questions will be based on the provided code. Read and understand the code!
Hope this helps and wish you all best, for both passing exams and working with this powerful SaaS solution!
