How to Prepare for—and Pass!—the Adobe Captivate Specialist Exam

Are you learning how to make instructional videos using Captivate 19? Getting overwhelmed by the application’s innumerable features or the counter-intuitive aspects of the Properties Panel and tool bars?

I feel your pain; or I used to feel it. A

This post is written for new Adobe Captivate users, professionals who want to earn an Adobe Captivate certification. Following the steps below should lead you down the road to passing this 90-minute, multiple choice exam.

But, given my experience and the efforts of two other designer I work with, you will need to study.

Backstory: In 2018, I quit my job working 65 hours a week teaching high school English to study instructional design. I knew I needed to master an “authoring tool”* quickly, and the two primary contenders in instructional design seem to be Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate.

I landed a job with a small training company, and my boss and a co-worker were willing to show me the basics of Adobe Captivate. Over several weeks, I cultivated enough patience to get comfortable with the timeline feature that undergirds many authoring tools, and I made my first video. Seeing my determination, my bosses offered to pay the $500 fee for me to take the Captivate Specialist Certification test in May 2020. They paid two other colleagues’ fees as well, and the three of us began studying for several hours a week using the 20 chapters of online tutorials that Adobe provides after you pay the examination fee.

Step 1: Take Adobe at their Word and Study their Video Tutorials.

Watching these tutorials was essential to all three of us passing the exam. I watched the 20 chapters once without taking notes, a second time while taking tons of notes, and a third time while taking exacting, precise, excruciatingly correct notes. My colleagues did the same, but we were still unsure what kinds of questions that exam would include. The paucity of useful information about what types of information the exam would cover drove me to compose this blog post. It’s hard to prepare effectively when you do not know the level of knowledge an upcoming assessment requires.

Step 2: The exam is open-book; take well-organized notes.

My conscientious colleague Teresa made a 150-page job aid detailing the information in the video tutorials. This resource helped me several times during the exam. Before drafting this blog, I interviewed the other co-worker, Cori, who took the exam, and she emphasized organizing your notes carefully before the test: “Because you have to work at a fairly fast pace to finish the test on time, it helped that my study materials were organized by category and clearly labeled with sticky notes. That helped me quickly find the right information if a question stumped me. I also recommend completing the practice exercises as you watch the videos for the first time. Then, I suggest that you watch the videos a second time to reinforce your memory of all the different procedures.”

Sidebar: Cori is 25, while Teresa and I…well, no need to mention our ages. Let’s just say that we are both digital immigrants: we felt we needed to watch the videos three times. I also used the Captivate book shown below to answer at least two questions on the exam.

This old-fashioned thing on the left is called a book; (it comes complete with paper pages that you can actually turn in three dimensions). This book, was a must for me before and during Adobe Captivate’s Specialist Certification exam.

Step 3: Prepare for tricky multiple-choice questions

I studied hard for the test because I was furloughed for two months, which enabled me to devote 4-5 hours a day to learning Captivate. But as the test date approached, I was still nervous, wondering, “What will the actual questions on the exam look like? How can I tell whether I am prepared?” After a long google search I found an outdated version of the exam, which revealed that my fears were well grounded. I did not know Captivate in sufficient detail to earn a score of 70% or higher (70% is the lowest score needed to get the certification.) Teresa felt the same way after reviewing the old exam I had found.

So, I wrote 60 nitpicky questions based on current Captivate features such Virtual Reality, Responsive projects, and Interactive Video. Here are some sample study questions that present a level of detail similar to what we encountered on the exam:

1. Question (for responsive projects): You have a slide with text captions in different fluid boxes. What function can you check/select to avoid having different font sizes in the various boxes? [Answer: Enable uniform text scaling.]

2. Question (for responsive projects): Describe 2 situations when you would want to make a fluid box static. [Answer: When adding video to a slide and working with overlapping objects.]

3. Question: You do not like your theme’s default style for text captions; what do you do?

[Answer: Go to the Object Style Manager and in the dialog preview the other default styles associated with your theme and choose one. Or create your own style in the Object Style Manager by making changes there, hitting “clone”, naming the style you just created and saving it. The style you created will now be added to the drop-down menus in the Object Style Manager and in Properties.]

My colleagues and I reviewed these questions, and passed the certification.

Teresa and I were not allowed to use the actual Captivate application during the exam as we took the test at home during the first part of the Covid-19 national lock down. We had remote proctors who monitored our movements to ensure that no one else was helping us and that we did not have a second computer in the room. Cori, on the other hand, was able to use the Captivate application on her computer when she took the exam in June. I am not sure why Adobe made their test conditions more lenient later on in the pandemic.

Sidebar 33: To learn how to a write advanced actions, create buttons, add rollover captions, and clickboxes, I watched many YouTube videos by Paul Wilson (pictured on the left). Paul’s slow, careful teaching style served me well. Thank you, Paul!

Good luck Captivate 10 scholars!

Maggie Rogers

9/6/2020

*Instructional design term for software used to create eLearning videos.