In 2006, SDL unveiled their Trados Certification program. I had been using Trados extensively at work and thought it would be neat to have the official Trados certification on my resume.
Soon after they released the Trados training program and certification tests, I signed up online to take the tests. To my surprise, the tests were hard. It had questions about what the specific menu names were and little details like that. If I had not used Trados as much as I had, I don’t think I would have passed. You had to be really familiar with the entire suite of tools.
I passed the test and got my own personal certification page generatred:
http://oos.sdl.com/asp/products/certified/index.asp?userid=14706
What was surprising was what came next. A few weeks later I got a package at work from SDL Trados. They sent a congratulatory card informing me that I was the first person to pass the Trados certification, and a bottle of vintage champagne! I certainly wasn’t expecting any of that.
Following that, they contacted me again for a quote and profile to put up on their certification Web site: (http://www.translationzone.com/en/certification/Default.asp). They also asked for a picture of me, but I guess I wasn’t photogenic enough for their site because they put a generic image of someone else above my quote. The current version of the page has a women and multiple quotes now.
In the end, it’s kind of neat. I can tell people I was the first person to ever be certified by SDL Trados. Since then I have also passed their SDL Trados 2007 certification as well.