For the 70% Who Didn't Make It Through Last Quarter

Part of my field readiness work is building peer-led learning communities — some for knowledge sharing, some for practice, one specifically for cert prep. This is about that last one.

Two tracks — Associate and Pro, both for our industry recognized product certifications.

The people who showed up knew their stuff. Associate track was mostly early-career SEs finding their footing. Pro track was senior SAs and PS folks who’d already been in production and wanted the credential to match. Sessions every two weeks. Mentors rotated from the previous cohort — when someone who barely passed came back to coach the next group, I felt it every time. A little echo from an earlier version of my career, when I used to watch students become the TAs I hadn’t hired yet.

But here’s what I kept watching: most people signed up genuinely motivated. They had real reasons — a deal that needed a credentialed SE in the room, a partner tier requirement, a gap they genuinely wanted to close. Then something happened. Q4 hit. A customer escalated. Two weeks passed without opening the course. The cert moved to next quarter — not because they stopped caring, but because it was never the most urgent thing in the room.

My finish rate stayed under 30%. For a community program I’ll take it — this kind of learning doesn’t come with a guarantee. But I kept thinking about the other 70%.

The live sessions helped when people made them. The problem was making them. These were SAs carrying quota, PS folks billing hours, new hires still finding their footing. The session that had exactly the answer someone needed was often the one they missed because a customer call ran long.

What the community couldn’t give anyone was a study partner at 11pm. Private, on-demand, available in whatever thirty-minute window they actually had — without the social cost of showing up behind and asking a basic question in front of a group.

So I built that.

Cert Squad Coach is a coach that’s there 24/7 — drills weak domains, grades what you actually write, shows up in whatever window you have without requiring you to schedule around it. HashiCorp first. Then I got greedy: AWS Solutions Architect, CKA, Red Hat RHCSA. The certs that keep coming up in deal conversations, partner requirements, career conversations. Still growing.

A community gives energy, accountability, mentorship. But only when you show up.

The app fills the rest — a nudge on a Tuesday night when momentum is low, just enough to keep the habit alive until the next session. When both are working together, people don’t just pass the cert. They come out with a rhythm they didn’t have before.

When I was a teacher, I started a STEM club nobody asked me to start. The principal didn’t commission it. I just thought it would matter, so I built it. I watched kids show up, get invested, go somewhere with it. I’ll never know the full shape of what that became for most of them — and that was never the point.

This feels exactly the same. Ten years from now I won’t be able to trace what this community or this app meant for the people who went through it. But I can already see enough to know it’s real — someone who almost quit in week six, who didn’t, who’s now the person others come to when they’re stuck. That’s the thing that keeps me building.

This work isn’t attached to any title I hold. It’s just who I am. Wherever I am next, I’ll be doing some version of this.