My impressions of the MadCap Flare certification

I am pleased that I recent­ly earned my Mad­Cap Flare Advanced Devel­op­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion test. This blog post shares my impres­sions of the test and how it might be improved.

What is Flare and the certification test?

Mad­Cap Flare helps you author tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion for online help, user man­u­als, soft­ware doc­u­men­ta­tion, and oth­er con­tent. Flare pro­vides func­tion­al­i­ty to devel­op, man­age, and pub­lish con­tent to sev­er­al for­mats, such as print, desk­top, and mobile devices.

The Mad­Cap Flare Advanced Devel­op­er cer­ti­fi­ca­tion is an online test con­sist­ing of 50 ques­tions, with an allot­ted test time of 75 min­utes. Unan­swered ques­tions are con­sid­ered incor­rect. To pass the test, you need a score of 70 per­cent or more.

Assum­ing you pass the test, you then need to sub­mit a sim­ple Flare project that con­tains at least:

• Twelve top­ics
• Six links
• Three images
• One skin
• One mas­ter page
• Two con­di­tion tags
• Two tar­gets

Mad­Cap rec­om­mends that the sub­ject of the help project be about a sports team or a place, such as a city, coun­try, or a tourist attrac­tion. I cre­at­ed a sim­ple help project that high­lights some of the tourist sites in West and North Vancouver.

How I studied for the test

Scott DeLoach’s book Mad­Cap Flare 2020: The Defin­i­tive Guide is an excel­lent resource to study for the test. The book cov­ers all of Flare’s main fea­tures and includes sam­ple ques­tions and answers for the test. Mad­Cap has also added some sam­ple ques­tions to its web­site.

My impressions of the test

As DeLoach’s book is about 500 pages, you are going to need to spend some time read­ing, sum­ma­riz­ing, and mem­o­riz­ing the mate­r­i­al. I then spent time review­ing the sam­ple ques­tions in the book and research­ing the ques­tions that I did not imme­di­ate­ly know. Also, the test is not free—it’s $149 US so I rec­om­mend you study rea­son­ably hard so that you don’t have to pay again to re-take it.

The test itself is chal­leng­ing but fair. If you’ve stud­ied and you use Flare on a reg­u­lar basis, most of the ques­tions will be famil­iar. Occa­sion­al­ly, though, there are some ques­tions sprin­kled through­out the test that are hard­er to answer, such as “What char­ac­ter is used to sep­a­rate first and sec­ond-lev­el index entries?” This is a sam­ple ques­tion that appears in DeLoach’s book so I am hope­ful­ly not reveal­ing too much.

The test could be improved by per­haps incor­po­rat­ing sce­nar­ios that a writer might face in the work­place and how one could use Flare to over­come those chal­lenges. Here are a few sam­ple ideas:

• Cre­at­ing tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion when prod­uct names keep chang­ing (an all-too-com­mon scenario).
• Think­ing about sin­gle-sourc­ing best practices.
• Cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent tar­gets using conditions.
• Set­ting up con­tent so it can eas­i­ly viewed on tablets and mobile devices.
• Work­ing with Flare con­tent that resides in a con­tent man­age­ment system.

Over­all, I am glad I took the test. Even though I use Flare almost every day when work­ing, I learned a lot by going through the process.