A couple of weeks ago I was asked about certification by one of our Business Consultants… in fact she asked me if I was certified? Thoughts of being carried away by men in white coats crossed my mind at the very mention of the word “certified”… but I digress!
When I joined SDL at the end of 2006 the first SDL Certification programme was just getting pulled together, and my team were responsible for the technical content, working closely with our enthusiastic marketing team. We had pretty tight timescales to deliver it, with three levels – Getting Started, Intermediate and Advanced. All based around two products – Translators Workbench 2007 and SDLX 2007. I can remember now the amount of effort that it took to prepare this from all the teams involved (Jenny, Tracey, Denise, Argyro… all put in a tremendous effort to make it a reality), and then more work in ensuring all our trainers were certified and had been through our train the trainer courses so they could deliver the certification training to lots of enthusiastic translators and project managers. Notwithstanding this we also wanted the material in other languages and this was a brilliant introduction for me into the world of a busy Language Service Provider as I was told in no uncertain terms on a number of occasions what a poor client we were! It was indeed a good education in those early months at SDL. I can also remember the long… long… long… telephone conversations with some of our enthusiastic customers who went through the certification and then didn’t agree with the answers! I can see the men in white coats running through my garden towards me as I think about all of this… but I survived!