Create a Practice Environment for the Practical Exercises Required for Certification

HubSpot Ideas

Status: Idea Submitted

1

I’m a new Hubspot user coming from a Marketo and Pardot background. I dove right into the Academy resources and have found the training to be pretty good. Also, support is amazing!
The one comment I do have about training is that I wish practical exercises could be completed in a practice or sandbox environment for training purposes, disconnected from the live org. Salesforce does this with their Trailhead community exercises and it’s a great way for new users to demonstrate what they’ve learned. And I think it’s important for three main reasons:

  1. One of the Hubspot lessons talks about maintaining clean data, but for the purpose of these practical exercises, I’m creating dummy data and polluting the database. It doesn’t make sense to add bad data to production for training purposes, then wait for it to be graded before it’s deleted. It just creates a lot of extra work and confusion and the possibility of introducing bad data.
  2. For new users, who are not 100% confident about what they are doing, having a practice environment where there is no fear that they are messing something up is a good idea
  3. As a new user, I wasn’t given all the permissions necessary to complete the practical exercises.

Support’s suggestion was to create a new account on the free version with the same email address, but Hubspot doesn’t support that. Then they suggested to create a new account in the free version, but after part way completing the exercises, I’m hesitant to start from scratch.

2

I really hope HubSpot will do this. I’ve had so many messes created in our portal by employees completing certifications. It’s not immediately apparent to people that they are in the live portal environment, and so they behave as if it were a simulation. What’s more frustrating is that they won’t get credit for completing the exercise if they go to a developer portal to do it, which is SO frustrating. If you’re going to require the practical exercises, there needs to be a way to protect our portals.

3

This is a great point to make. When I first got started in HubSpot I created some kind of issue because I was in a live portal.

4

Hi there! Super excited to share that HubSpot Academy has added a practice mode into the majority of the exercises in our lessons and courses.

You can also check out some of the stand alone exercises right in our catalog. If you log into HubSpot Academy and search “Try It Out” you’ll be able to hop in and practice those exercises.

Would love to hear your feedback on how these practice mode exercises help.