Adobe Certification: Skills That Open Doors in Tech & Consulting

Adobe Links

• Learn more about Adobe DX Certification
• Students can get a 50% discount on certifications using code A4AX9WJAE4 (must use uni email address)
• University administrators - connect your students with learning opportunities at Adobe
• Questions? Reach out: [email protected]

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to this live edition of Strategy Simplified. My name is Namaan. I'm the Chief Operating Officer of Management Consulted, and I am thrilled to be joined today by Shawn and Nick from Adobe. We're going to be diving into the world of digital certifications for the digital age.

Thank you so much for joining us, whether you're on YouTube Live, LinkedIn Live, or whether you're listening afterward on the podcast. We're thrilled to have you here for this fun and fast-paced conversation.

If you are an entry-level candidate looking to pursue roles in tech, consulting, engineering, et cetera, this conversation is for you. If you're in the middle of a mid-career pivot and thinking about, “Okay, how do I upskill or reskill for this new world that we find ourselves in?” this conversation is also for you. If you're in career services looking for new and novel ways to support your students, this conversation has something for you as well.

So wherever you are, whoever you are, welcome. We're really excited to be diving in.

Without further ado, what I want to do is first give you all who are here live, and those of you who are watching on Spotify and YouTube after the fact, a chance to engage with the landing page for the Digital Experience Certification Program so that you can click around and look through what we're going to be talking about today.

So go ahead and scan this QR code that you see on your screen right here. It'll take you right to the homepage that you need to be at. And if you're here live today, as you're exploring the resources and questions arise, pop them in the chat. We've got a team here who's monitoring the chat and we'll try and get to some live audience questions by the end of our hour together.

As you're scanning that QR code and as you're exploring those certification options, let me introduce our special guests today and then we're going to dive into our conversation.

Meet Shawn Loutensock and Nick Hilton from Adobe

So I'm going to start with Shawn Loutensock. Shawn is an Adobe Experience Cloud University Program Manager. Over the past two years at Adobe, he's helped bridge the gap between industry and academia, empowering students with the tools and credentials they need to thrive in today's digital economy.

Shawn's got a background in project management and education. He's passionate about preparing the next generation of digital professionals by bridging the gap between skills learned in the classroom and the demands of the modern workforce.

Shawn, welcome to Strategy Simplified.

Thanks, Namaan. So excited to be here. We've been looking forward to this for a while now. Excited to talk about this topic and answer questions that the audience might have.

I know you and I connected way back in the summer and we've been kind of dreaming and planning this for a while. So I'm really excited that it finally gets to happen today.

And we're joined by your colleague, Nick Hilton, as well. Nick, welcome.

Nick is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe. He's got nearly four years of experience at the company, and he plays a key role in shaping and promoting Adobe's digital experience solutions.

Nick, our team wrote this bio for you, by the way. So I want everyone to know that I'm saying all these nice things about Nick and Shawn and they didn't ask me to say these.

He brings a unique blend of strategic insight and creative expertise, backed by an MBA from the University of Utah. And Nick, you're passionate about helping students and educators harness the power of Adobe tools to thrive in today's economy.

Welcome to the show.

I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much, Namaan. Yeah, we're super excited to answer these questions and just be on this podcast. So thanks a ton.

Absolutely, absolutely.

What Is Adobe Experience Cloud and Digital Experience?

Well, let's start here, Nick and Shawn, if you don't mind. I'll pose this to you both, and whoever's best suited to answer, just go ahead and dive in.

For those who are unfamiliar—who maybe were drawn to this episode because they saw the name Adobe in the title and thought, “Okay, if Adobe's got something to say about the future of work, I'm interested, but I have no idea what the Digital Experience Certification Program is”—can one of you just give us an overview of what the heck it is we're talking about today?

Yeah, I can go ahead and take that. So first of all, I think it's really important to address Digital Experience, or Adobe Experience Cloud.

Chances are the majority of people listening, when they think of Adobe, think of Creative Cloud. And that's not us. Our area of expertise is Experience Cloud. That is everything in the Experience Cloud suite. This is more for enterprise companies using our software and applications.

So just to set the stage, maybe you’ve heard of some of our products like Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Commerce (which used to be Magento), or Adobe Workfront, which we acquired a few years back—that’s where Shawn comes from—and then also one of our flagship products, Adobe Experience Manager.

So maybe some of those ring a bell, maybe not, but if not, that's okay. That's why we're here. We're excited to share some of these products with you and how certification can play a role in your career seeking and/or job pivoting.

So that is what I think is really important to know before we start talking about certifications.

Then I'll dive in and just share slightly on our certification program. It started over 15 years ago, and it was a much smaller program then. Now it's grown—we've grown 5x, five times, in the past four or five years. It was created to really give partners a way to gain credentials to showcase their expertise for their clients on the implementation side.

Certifications in general are a great way to prove your knowledge on a certain solution. That's why we're here and we want everybody to know: anyone can do it, put in the work, get certified, and set yourself apart. So that's it in a nutshell, but I'm sure we'll dive into it even deeper.

Yeah, a couple of things I would add to Nick's point.

When it comes to Adobe and Adobe's business in general, as Nick mentioned, most people recognize Creative Cloud, especially if you're a student on here. I've talked to thousands of students over the last couple of years, and I would venture to say 99% of them think that Adobe's business consists of Creative Cloud.

But in reality, only one third of what we do is Creative Cloud. Another third is Document Cloud, and then where Nick and I sit—and what we're here talking about promoting today—is Experience Cloud. So it's important to understand the distinction.

One of the reasons I was really excited about doing this was to not only help educate people beyond Creative Cloud when it comes to Adobe, but to help students especially understand all of the opportunities that exist out there that they probably were not aware of.

Absolutely, yeah.

I love that. I've been an Adobe power user myself for over a decade, mostly in Creative Cloud, but I've followed the performance of the Experience Cloud business just because I'm a follower of the business and the stock. I know it plays an outsized role in what Adobe is doing as an organization.

Inside Adobe’s DX Certification Program and Its Growth

One of the things that you mentioned, Nick, that caught my attention is you said you've doubled the certification offering in the last five years. That tracks with my own personal experience because I honestly, before the last five years, hadn't even heard of Adobe certification.

So can you talk to me about what the catalyst was for that growth?

Yeah, I think this is— and I think we'll talk even more about this later—but the catalyst was mainly the need.

We have a whole partner program here at Adobe, the Solution Partner Program, and we work really closely with them. In order to be a part of this partner program, a requirement is you need to have X amount of your employees certified with the DX solutions.

So that's a big reason. There was a need. A lot of it was them coming to us saying, “How can we get more certification enablement? How can we get a certification on X, Y, and Z products?”

They really did see the value of certifications with their clients. If their employees are certified in our solutions, that sets them apart and establishes trust with these partners. You can even get specialized in a specific solution, meaning X amount of your employees need to be certified in that solution.

If that's the case, then you can get this specialization. It's kind of like a badge of honor that you can flex to your clients, saying, “Look, we are specialized in Experience Manager and Marketo and Assets,” all these things. Then clients will say, “Okay, without even knowing anything about your people or your employees, I automatically trust that they know their stuff because X amount are certified.”

Because of that, we saw a need to keep growing and get more certifications out there. We grew our program by 5x in the past four or five years based on certifications that we offer. Now we offer over 50 certifications.

We've done a lot of work in the past few years getting the number of certifications out there, but also now developing enablement to prepare people for certifications.

The only thing I would add to that is: companies and businesses nowadays, especially in the tech industry, are going more and more digital. The reason for this is because it allows companies to drive better customer engagement, and it allows for greater data-driven business decisions.

Because of that, obviously there's becoming more and more of a need for people who are certified in digital experience-type products.

So what are some of your fastest-growing certifications? I can imagine what some of the legacy certifications would have been and what some of the legacy organizations would have been that encouraged their employees to go after those certifications. I think of agencies, for example.

But are there new types of roles, new types of organizations that are onboarding? And what kind of certifications are they really interested in their people possessing?

I can share some from last year at our Adobe Summit—what our most popular and rising certifications were.

Adobe Workfront is a big one. We acquired them—how long ago, Shawn?

What, four years? Almost five years.

Almost five years ago, yeah. And so this has been a growing product. We've built new certifications around this in the past few years, and that's a growing one.

Our flagships have been Experience Manager and Marketo and Commerce, but some of our newer ones that are getting more traction are RT-CDP, so Real-Time Customer Data Platform. With the times, new technology comes out and people are adopting it. That's a big one as well that's on the rise.

One thing, Namaan, because I know we have a lot of students on the call: specific to our university or academic program, there are a few of these products that we're pretty heavily marketing to students. One of those Nick mentioned is Workfront. Another is Customer Journey Analytics. And we also are marketing our AEM, or Adobe Experience Manager, product.

That doesn't mean students are limited to those. We have 12 different solutions in our suite, so there are a lot to choose from, and Nick mentioned several of them. But there are obviously reasons we're promoting certain ones to universities, which we can get into if you'd like later on.

How Students Should Choose an Adobe Certification Path

So Shawn, if I'm a student and I've got these 12 pathways, if you will, available to me, how do I pick and choose which one is right for me?

And even at a broader level, why do I go with Adobe versus another digital or tech certification provider?

I can hear the cynics in our audience thinking, “Okay, why you guys? Why this? I've been exposed to millions of certification programs over the course of my academic career. I feel like I can learn everything from YouTube and TikTok now. So why Adobe—and how do I pick which pathway is for me?”

Yeah, I feel like I could probably spend a half hour answering that question, but I'll try not to be too long-winded.

First of all, our target audience when we're looking at student populations is generally students who are going after computer science degrees, data science, information systems. We also target a lot of marketing and business-type degrees.

The reason for that is because they fit pretty nicely with our solutions. Just to give you an example, Customer Journey Analytics—it says it right in the name of the tool, right? It's an analytics tool, an analytics solution. So that's a really great fit for a student who's a data science or data analytics major and is really interested in potentially going into the workforce as maybe a data analyst or a business analyst.

Workfront is a project management or work management solution. That’s a really good fit for individuals who might be technical, but not CS-level technical. They're not necessarily developers. They might want to be a project manager down the road or a product owner or something like that.

It's important to understand that all of our products have a couple of different paths that a student or learner can go down. One of those paths is a developer path. A CS student who wants to be a developer in their career could easily go in and do one of these developer certifications, and that would help prepare them to be able to develop in that specific product.

So yeah, there are a lot of different targets. One of the nice things about the QR code—the site that you posted up there—is if you go into the Community tab of that site, there's a University Outreach page that actually helps walk students through which certifications are a good fit for them.

Now, why you would go with Adobe over others: I can probably speak to the university aspect of that by saying that we're super dynamic and flexible, first of all. We offer universities opportunities to partner with us in a lot of different ways. We don't have just one specific program that says, “You have to do this,” or, “You have to do that.” We've been really flexible with universities on how they integrate, embed, and partner.

One of the other great things that we do is we offer students a 50% discount on all of our certifications, which are already pretty cheap, to be honest. They cost about $125 normally, but a student can get those at 50% off. And at our partner universities, we generally will offer a certain number of free vouchers to students.

Adobe certifications are recognized in the industry. We know this—we've done a lot of research around job opportunities with our certifications and also salary opportunities, which is a big deal, right? Our research tells us that an Adobe DX certification will typically mean an extra 10 to 15% in salary.

So I don't know—anything else you want to add to that, Nick, just for the industry in general?

Yeah, for sure. I would also add that Adobe has—like I mentioned earlier with the Solution Partner Program—we have so many partners that are hungry for Adobe-certified talent.

We recently had a get-together with a lot of our Adobe subject matter experts on the partner side. This was external: a lot of different businesses, a lot of different stakeholders for this program who are very invested in certifications.

We got them together in San Jose for our symposium event, asking them a bunch of questions: “How can we improve our program? What's going well?” The biggest feedback that they gave us was that we just need to get the word out there. People need to become certified because we have so many job openings and we can't find the talent we need.

We want people to be certified. That sets them apart, but it also tells the hiring managers at these partners, “Look, I know my stuff,” and it makes them billable faster.

Long story short, there is a need out there. There are so many companies—top companies. Some of our partners are Accenture, IBM, Deloitte—big, big names that are looking for Adobe talent. So for a student, that's value number one right there.

You want to land a job in consulting or digital marketing? There is a need for certified talent.

And I'll just second that real quick. I talk to talent leaders in consulting all day every day. Almost all of them are telling me that they're looking for more specialized talent earlier on in the career pathway.

So this almost seems like too good of an opportunity to pass up. At $125 to set yourself apart in the market, what's the downside, Shawn, if I could ask you? If I'm getting 50% off $125, why would I not do this?

Yeah, I don't think there really is a downside unless you're just not even in the ballpark of ever touching one of these tools in your life, which is probably not going to happen.

If you're going to go into business, into tech, or into any large company, I can tell you we have customers who use our products on a daily basis who are really large customers that you'd know.

When I do webinars, one of the videos that I show is Delta Airlines, for example, as one of our customers. I fly Delta because I live just outside of Salt Lake and that's a Delta hub, so I'm usually going on Delta when I travel. I've noticed all of the different ways that they use Adobe DX products in their customer experience.

From the app that you use to book your flight, to your onboarding experience, to the entertainment console that you have on your seat—it's all run on the back end by Adobe DX products.

My point is, chances are at some point in your career, even if you're not a really technical person, you are going to be required to learn one of our solutions, and maybe more. So why not get a head start on that?

Why Digital Experience Skills Matter in an Experience-Based Economy

I would argue that we're moving into what I would call an experience-based economy. The way that you differentiate is the feeling and the experience you provide your customers, not just the product itself. And so that really resonates with me, Shawn.

I am curious to hear from you—and maybe we'll start with Nick here. Can you unpack that for us a little bit more? If you agree with my take that we're moving from a services-based economy to an experience-based economy, why are these digital experience skills so critical for the business and strategy roles we're talking about?

And could you maybe even define “digital experience” for us?

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Yes, so when you think of digital experience, we live in an exciting time. Personalization is everything. It's super exciting from a customer standpoint. It might seem a little bit overwhelming from a business perspective, but that's why we have our products: to help with this personalized customer journey.

To expand on it a little bit, a digital experience is everything you think of—all your touchpoints in an experience when you're buying something.

Say you want new shoes and you look at the website for the first time. You click on a couple to see them up close, you scroll through the pictures, and you end up not buying. The next time you're on Google Chrome, you might see an ad pop up for those same shoes. You think, “How is that possible? I just looked at those.”

They're capturing this data to make it a more personalized experience for you. You see it again, it takes a few times before you put it into your cart. And then if you put it into your cart, you might get a notification from the app—say the Nike app—that says, “Hey, you put these in your cart. Do you want to purchase these?”

If they sit in your cart for a while, maybe they'll have a promotion saying, “Hey, we just noticed these are in your cart. We'll add 20% off if you check out by this date.” Different things that provide a positive experience for you.

Also, simple things like Shawn was mentioning on Delta. You go onto your flight, it happens to be your birthday, and it says, “Happy Birthday, Nick,” on your screen. That's simple, but it goes a long way. It's like, “Oh my gosh, they know who I am. They value me as a customer. They wished me happy birthday.”

Simple—but to be honest, this is expected now. From customers, this is expected. If it's not personalized—if you get an email that says, “Hi everyone”—you immediately check out. If it doesn't say your name, the chances of you reading that email go way down.

In fact, recently I uncovered a stat that said about 80% of customers are more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized experiences. That's a huge stat. And just like you said, Namaan, we're living in that age that if you don't have personalized experiences or digital experiences, you're behind.

So I actually agree.

It's like going to the Emerald City, pulling back the curtain, and you find that Adobe is actually running everything.

Right. Yeah.

But we're not fake, okay?

We finally found the wizard behind the curtain. All right.

It sounds like to me, the real value proposition of this platform is that it enables businesses to provide personalization at scale.

Absolutely.

Which is a really exciting outcome of this age of AI that we're living in—if businesses are able to take advantage and if they're able to find talent that's able to help them implement that.

So if we all agree that this is what's required now, that this is what's expected—digital experience is a part of every career path, a part of every business—then why wouldn't this become a part of university curriculums?

And if you agree with the premise that it should be a part of university curriculums, how is Adobe working with universities to help them implement some of the skill-building into the more traditional academic experience?

How Adobe Partners with Universities

Yeah, I mean, you're right, Namaan. This is absolutely the future. And the reason universities should take this seriously is because this is really about jobs. It's about job prep for your students.

Traditionally, universities are really reluctant to change and to implement new learning paths and new degree fields. I think over the last few years we've seen more universities start to offer things like digital marketing courses and maybe even a digital marketing degree.

But I think that down the road, universities are going to have to adapt or die. The small, dynamic universities that can make changes quickly are going to be preparing students at a higher rate.

Now, how can universities implement this? There are a lot of different ways. We have a number of universities we partner with who have found different creative ways to get this information in front of their students.

Ideally, in a perfect world, we would love for a university to take our courses, figure out which ones are a good fit for their students, and embed them into existing curriculum. We do have some universities that are doing that already, and they've been pretty successful.

Other universities—maybe that's a slog. It takes a lot. We know how universities work. There's a lot of paperwork, contract work, training—there's a lot that has to happen to throw new coursework into a curriculum.

So we've had a lot of universities get creative with this. They've created boot camps, immersion programs. We have universities that have done “digital literacy summits” as day-long events. We have senior project teams who have taken our products and done for-credit projects using them.

There are a lot of ways you can do it. You can get involved with clubs. For example, I have a number of tech clubs who reach out to us. I'll go on campus and attend an event or do an information session or a webinar.

That's the great thing—we're super flexible about it and we love to explore opportunities.

I think what we're really talking about here is differentiation. If you're a business, your margin comes from the experience that you provide. If you're a university, your point of differentiation becomes how you prepare students for jobs in today's economy and tomorrow's economy—not jobs in yesterday's economy.

So I like the flexibility, Shawn, that you're talking about: the boot camps, the hackathon-type programming you mentioned, really applied learning that helps students not just get head knowledge, but experiential knowledge as well.

Can we talk a little bit about the practicality of this? We work with 150 universities and we hear them say a few things. Number one, students are busy and their attention spans are lower than they've ever been. Number two, we're budget constrained. We have to make difficult trade-offs and decisions around what we invest in and what we don't.

So can you talk to me about how Adobe helps universities get over some of those hurdles? And if I'm a university leader or even a student leader, how can I bring this kind of experience to my campus?

Yeah, to the financial question: first, let me say that we don't charge universities for our program. We're not a cost center. We're not doing this to try to make money for our program or for Adobe.

The opportunities we offer to universities—we're never going to charge you for those. This is free. We spend a lot of money to bring the opportunities to you for free, but it's Adobe spending the money, not the university. So as far as that goes, there’s not really a lot of worry that Adobe is going to ask for thousands of dollars to implement a program.

As to the students, I would say the easiest and best thing to do if this sounds interesting and you'd like to have it implemented at your university is go talk to a few people who may be interested on campus. Career Services is a big one. We work with a lot of Career Services directors and professionals who help us get connected and implement and market.

Every university has some form of Employer Relations advisor, or someone who's over Employer Relations, or someone who's over Experiential Learning. I would try to track those people down and let them know about this.

It would also be great to talk to faculty. If you know about a digital marketing class or you're in a CS, IS, or data science program, talk to your professors and let them know that this program exists. Most of them are going to be interested because they ultimately have a vested interest in you as a student being successful when you leave their university.

The best way to contact us and get more information from a university is to email [email protected]
. I monitor that pretty regularly and I can reach out and set up an exploratory meeting with the Career Services department or whoever it is on that university side.

I love it. And we'll pop that email in the show notes as well. So folks, if you missed that, don't worry about it. You'll find it in the description of this episode.

Keeping Certifications Current in a Fast-Moving AI & Analytics World

Nick, I wanted to ask you: when I think about certification—either from the employer perspective or from the candidate perspective—I think of day-one readiness. If I'm going to invest in the certification, that's what I want, right?

So when we think about the world of analytics, the world of AI, some of the spheres that your certifications touch—those skills are evolving so rapidly. How is Adobe, and how are your certifications, keeping up with the changes that are happening in the marketplace?

Yeah, that's a great question.

We have an exam development team that oversees the development of our exams, but also the maintenance of the exams. It's on them—they try their best to update exams every one to two years, depending on the new content and the updates to all these applications and software.

So that's the development and maintenance side. But it is an exciting time because I was just at a conference last week and I probably got this question five to ten times: “Are you guys having a certification on AI? What's the latest and greatest?”

If anybody is following Adobe Summit, just a little bit of a spoiler: there's going to be a lot of focus on generative AI at Adobe Summit coming up. So if you have interest in that, you can maybe catch some of those virtual events.

But I would say the biggest thing is the maintenance and time and effort that the team puts into updating and maintaining the exams.

Are there prereqs that I should have as a candidate before I start exploring or engaging with Adobe certifications? Or could I have literally zero experience and just plug right in?

I was waiting to get to this point, because that is students’ number one question: “Where do I start? Can I start right now if I don't have any experience?”

Which is probably the majority of students. Before I took this role, I didn't have any experience on the Experience Cloud side either.

So, great question. The answer is yes and no. It depends on the product.

There are some products and some certifications where you need some basic developer experience, depending on the coding language. You need some prior knowledge going into that professional-level certification.

Now, for the consulting side—for the business practitioner side of the house—I would say you don't necessarily need prior experience. We encourage you to get your hands wet with the product, kind of feel around if possible, but a lot of students don't have that opportunity. Maybe they're not working in a place that offers these solutions, because these are enterprise solutions.

A lot of the time, their first experience is on-the-job experience with these products. But with that being said, we have a lot of enablement at the professional level for solution-specific paths.

We have a prep guide. You can go through a whole prep guide that also brings you over to Experience League. If you don't know what these are, just search Adobe Experience League and go to our site. It will help walk you through: search for the product you're looking for, then you'll see everything in one place on an exam card—all of our study materials.

If you go through those, it will help you get a good idea of what these products are and what you can expect on the exam.

I will say, if you don't have any experience with the product at all, we also have Foundations courses for you to understand what the product is about. That helps you if you're weighing your options and thinking, “This sounds interesting. I kind of want to do digital marketing. Adobe Marketo Engage sounds like it would benefit me for the future—and Adobe Analytics would as well.”

If you're trying to figure out what direction you want to take first, take the Foundations course. They're not very long and they give you a good idea of where to start—if you like it, if you want to invest more time in that specific area, and if you want to become an expert in that area.

So the answer to your question is yes and no. Depending on the product, you can start today.

Visit the site that we gave you on that QR code. Visit the site and start exploring. It's never too soon to start a course. It's all on-demand and free.

I would say everybody has to start somewhere. These certifications, as Nick mentioned—especially the business practitioner ones—are approachable.

Let me just say: if I can learn Workfront, I'm really not that smart. I promise you, I'm not that intelligent. And I had to learn Workfront and eventually became an expert in it. It's really enhanced my career quite a bit.

But I didn't have experience. I had never touched a project management or work management tool before I went to Workfront. I had a little bit of experience in project management, so at least I knew some of the terminology.

The Foundations courses—most of them are about an hour long. They don't take a ton of your time. Maybe you take one and decide, “That doesn't sound like it's for me,” and you move on to a different one. That's the benefit.

Real-World Impact: Workfront, Project Management & Integration

Shawn, I'm curious—if you don't mind sharing a personal anecdote—in your project management experience, what was the greatest friction that Workfront helped alleviate for you?

Was it that you were able to deliver faster or on time more often? Were you able to bring stakeholders earlier into a process? What was the friction point that it really helped solve for you?

My gosh, it was a lifesaver, honestly. When I first started using Workfront and learned it, I used to say to my colleagues all the time, “I wish I had this tool five years ago. It would have made my life so much easier.”

Before I went to Workfront, I was a Career Services Director at a university—Newmont College of Computer Science in Salt Lake City. One of the things that I did as the Career Services Director was oversee the senior project program at that university.

Every quarter I would have probably 10 to 12 project teams that would go out and do project work for various businesses. I had to manage all of those. It was really cumbersome trying to manage all of those projects out of an Excel spreadsheet or Google Doc.

Workfront is great in that it helps you get organized. The reporting capabilities are superb. You always know where you're at in your projects—what's behind, what's late, what's on time. It helps you resource the project, so it allows you to stay on budget and understand where you need to put more effort and time and resources.

One of the great things about Workfront is they developed this product called Fusion, which connects to Workfront and allows Workfront to talk to hundreds of different solutions and products—like Workday, for example. You can connect Workfront into all these different solutions.

So it's really like a one-stop shop for work.

The Future of Education – Industry Collaboration & Adobe’s Role

I think you all are on the cutting edge. I'll just say that, because I think the future of professional education is not necessarily on campus and it's not necessarily even with your employer. It's with the producers of the tools that we use.

So I'm curious to hear from you both. If you were going to look into your crystal ball and say, “By 2030, this is what education and industry collaboration is going to look like, and this is what Adobe's role is going to be in that transformation,” what would your predictions be?

Nick, we'll start with you if you don't mind.

Sure. We have our goals. As far as certification goes, we are a little bit behind—maybe a lot behind—some of our competitors on the certification front. But there's a reason why our leaders and stakeholders are so invested in certification and why we're growing so rapidly.

Our products are comprehensive for digital marketing and digital experience. We are leaders in that space. Four, maybe even five of our products have landed on Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Workfront, Commerce, AEM—off the top of my head, those three are industry leaders in their spaces.

We have a whole portfolio. So we have the products for digital marketing and digital experience. We're leaders. We have the brand of Adobe. But we have to be the pioneers. We have to pave the way and think outside the box, doing things like what Shawn is doing—partnering with universities.

That's what I see in the future. I see some of our products getting interwoven inside curriculum so universities are setting their students up for success in a digital experience world.

I'll leave it at that. I do see that as the future, and I think we'll be there. It's just going to take some work on our end to get that awareness out there. Shawn, you can add to that if you'd like.

Yeah, I think Nick said it pretty well, but I would say that in the future, as I said earlier, universities are going to have to learn how to adapt or die when it comes to providing their students with cutting-edge opportunities for jobs and internships.

I'll put a little plug in for the university I worked at. I was a Career Services Director at what I would consider a cutting-edge university because one of the things they did was, in the last three quarters of your schooling, you were required to do what they called an Enterprise Project Program.

The university would partner with companies like Adobe and find projects for their students to work on. Those students—most of them didn't even really do internships because they already had three really quality projects to put on their resumes when they left the university.

I see a lot of that sort of thing in the future with academia.

As Nick mentioned, one of the things we're really going to promote heavily in 2026 is finding ways to take our courses that lead to our certifications and get those embedded into curriculum. I think universities that are willing to adapt and do things like that—and maybe even create digital marketing degrees—are going to find that their students go out and hit the ground running.

I will tell you, I've talked to a lot of employers who use Adobe products. I'm not going to name the name because I don't want to get in trouble, but there's a really large employer here in Utah—one of the largest hiring companies in the state. The person who oversees the Product department at that company lives across the street from me. They use Workfront every day in their daily business.

When I talked to him about what I do, he told me flat out: if he has a resume that comes in for an open position and it has a Workfront certification on it, that is a guaranteed job interview.

So it doesn't necessarily guarantee you the job—you still have to earn it—but having that nowadays is huge. Just to give you a reference, Adobe itself, on average, receives about 400 resumes for every open position.

So having something like an Adobe certification on your resume when you apply to companies who are customers or partners of ours is a huge deal. They don't have to spend six months training you. They spend a lot of money just training you on how to use that product. If you can come in already having used the product and your resume says, “I can do this right away,” that's a massive deal to an employer.

It goes back to what you said, Namaan, about being job-ready. That's our goal: to enable our candidates to get certified so that when they get hired, they can be job-ready and have the skills necessary to hit the ground running.

Yeah, that's why our audience is here, right? They want to be job-ready and they're motivated to do that. That's why I'm so glad that you both were able to come on today.

AI Tools, Personal Growth & Culture at Adobe

As we start to land this plane a little bit, I'm curious. I've heard you both mention a lot of different products and certifications.

Is there a web or a roadmap that exists that helps me figure out: if I want to get certified in multiple products, is there an optimal order? Or if I want to pursue a certain career path, are there four certifications I should really focus on? Is there a tool like that that exists that you can point people to?

I would say sort of. Our University Outreach page on the certification site does have a tool that helps students specifically map that out.

To this audience, I want to make sure you know that that page is pretty new. It just launched in May or June, so it's only been there for five or six months. It's what I would call phase one right now. As you continue to follow us and work with us, there’ll be more tools available.

For example, one of the things we're going to add to that page is a job board. It will allow students to go in and say, “Hey, I want to be a project manager,” and it will direct them not only on which certification path they should take, but also what jobs are out there if they get certified.

The other thing I would say is all of our products are pretty standalone. It's not necessarily, “If I get certified in CJA, my next step would be to get certified in Workfront.” They're standalone products. Some of them probably do interconnect and would be useful for certain job roles, but Nick might know that better than me.

Yeah, just to that point: it really depends. It's hard to answer generically because our portfolio varies so widely. But as Shawn was saying, we do have some solutions and certifications that complement each other.

For example, we have Adobe Analytics, but we also have Customer Journey Analytics. So if you're certified in one of those, it could be a good next step to go to the other certification.

To answer your question more simply, we don't have a clear path right now. But because of AI, that's something that's been on our roadmap, and we're starting to dive into that to make for a better user experience, which I'm really excited about.

So stay tuned. Nothing in the next couple quarters, but we're getting there to make it a more personalized experience for students and for anybody coming to the portal for the first time so they can say, “This is who I am. Maybe upload my resume. What path do you suggest for me? What certification maps to my career hypothesis?”

We're getting there. It's not there yet, but I would say the best place to go is the Community University page like Shawn mentioned. That's the best mapping for a student or job-pivoter. It gives you job roles and says, “If you're interested in being a project manager, this is the first course to start.”

I believe there are eight job roles listed on there. I want to make sure the audience knows that there are probably 50 different job roles you could go after using these certs. We've just listed eight that we think are good for students in an entry-level capacity.

I love that. I love that.

Well, for both of you, this is your first time on Strategy Simplified. What we always like to do as we wrap up conversations is ask a couple of personal questions because we like to get to know you a little bit better as well.

My first question for you both—and you can take this in any order you want—would be: what's one AI tool or tech innovation that you're personally most excited about right now, and maybe that you've come up with a unique use case for that's not work-related?

I'll go, Shawn.

This is fun. I love traveling. I love languages—something that I find fascinating. I've learned German. I even studied some German at university and lived in Germany for a time, did an internship over there.

But in Utah—I live in Utah—I never have experiences to practice my German. Recently I thought, “My German is suffering. I need to keep this up.”

Of course, when you think about learning a language, you think Duolingo. So I investigated Duolingo, and something that really excited me and kind of blew my mind was that I can have literal conversations in German with this cartoon character on the screen. It says, “Call Sophie.” I called Sophie and we had a conversation.

At first I thought, “They might be grading my speaking live, but I don't think she'll build off what I'm saying.” But sure enough, I asked her questions, she answered, she went into detail, she asked me other questions, and I had a conversation with this person in a foreign language.

Obviously, I should have known this was possible because of ChatGPT, Copilot, everything. But this was awesome. It was a really cool way AI is bringing value to my life. It graded my conversation, gave me a score report like, “You mispronounced that,” and helped me with a point of reference to improve my language speaking.

So that's something fun, not work-related, but really cool.

I love that. As someone who speaks multiple languages but feels like I'm losing that sharp edge—I need to look into that.

Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah, you should.

Well, I just learned something from Nick. I speak French—or at least I did in a past life—so I should use that.

I'll admit, I'm a rudimentary user of AI. I don't know that I've ever used it for anything fun.

I use it—

Never too late to start, Shawn.

Right, just business mostly. But I'll say that I've used Copilot and ChatGPT a lot to help develop our university program. It's been super helpful.

One of the other things that's great about it is: it is so easy to find contacts now. If I target a university and say, “Hey, I want to know who the Employer Relations person is,” I just put that in Copilot and it pops it right up. It's great.

A lot of the design of our university program has been aided through AI for me. I've been able to do a lot of research on our competitors and research on other university programs. It's a super useful tool in business, for sure.

You've got your own personal research assistant, Shawn.

Yeah.

I love that. One final question for you all. You both have been at Adobe for a handful of years. What's one thing that surprised you about working at Adobe in a positive way—one thing you didn't expect to experience, but you have?

I can go first.

I always thought, “Adobe is a top company I want to work for. This would be awesome.” But part of me was intimidated. When I got hired at Adobe, I was so excited but also like, “Man, the stakes are high. I'm working among really smart professionals. I don't want to mess up.”

I was very surprised at how amazing the culture has been here. Our core values are really about growth, supporting each other, being transparent, showing up, taking accountability, but still recognizing that we're human. “Be yourself, come as you are.”

It's been really cool to see: I've grown a ton professionally, but even when stakes are high on certain projects, I've been in a space where I've been able to fail and learn. I don't feel dumb asking questions. It's been a really cool, safe place to work and grow. So I've loved that.

I think for me, I come from a unique experience when it comes to working for a company the size of Adobe. I'm a Communications major. I wasn't a technical person at all. I never in a million years would have expected to work for a company like Adobe when I first graduated college. That wasn't even on my radar.

The last three companies I've worked for were smaller. Two companies ago we had 75 employees. The last company I worked for was Workfront. When I first started there, we had about 400 employees and it eventually grew to about 1,000 before Adobe acquired us. Now Adobe has about 30,000 employees.

So it's obviously a large company with lots of offices around the world. I think the thing that surprised me the most was that Adobe has somehow done an awesome job, for a company that size, of maintaining almost a small- to mid-sized type culture.

Most people, when they go work for large companies the size of Adobe, just get lost. It's hard. You don't know who to talk to, you don't know where to go. I don't feel like I lost a lot of culture when Adobe acquired Workfront.

They're really good about taking care of their employees and making sure everybody feels valued. It's a really dynamic environment with lots and lots of opportunity. I'm a living example of that.

When I first came over to Adobe, I was a System Administrator for Workfront. Three years later, I'm running a University Outreach Program. If you have a passion for something, Adobe is a great place to be and allows you to do that.

I love that. I think it's impossible for your culture not to be replicated in the products that you create. Incredibly underrated and important.

Well, Nick and Shawn, thank you so much for joining us on Strategy Simplified today. Just a quick recap for our audience:

If you're a student or a mid-career switcher interested in an Adobe Digital Experience certification, you can scan the QR code that you see right here. You can also click the link in the description below to get to that landing page and start to explore options and opportunities for you today.

And if you represent a university and want to partner with Adobe, then the email address for you to get in touch with Shawn and Nick's team is in the description as well. Go ahead and write them—it's at no cost to you at all—so I highly recommend you take advantage of that.

Shawn, Nick, thanks so much for this great conversation. I hope a lot of people get to explore the great work that you're doing.

Yeah, it's been fun. Really appreciate it.

This is awesome. Great opportunity. Thank you.

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