Rethinking the Clay Certification Strategy 🎓

Hey Clay team Hans here.

Excited to present my take home.

A quick thing to help you navigate through these deliverables is that starts with the learner journey and on here you will see the video that you're looking at now.

Then two, you can click on here there's a score skeleton will have a video as well.

Then the credential will have a short, video as well.

So then diving into what I've come up with over studying or after studying the current university.

So the verdict is that the site's problem is not routing, a lack of content, anything like that, but it's mostly organization and then let's call it long term thinking.

Not necessarily long term thinking, but building it in a more durable way, which is obviously something that you believe as well, which is likely why the current certification program is paused because it's very difficult to keep things relevant.

And as, as everything's just moving so quickly, moving so fast.

so what I'm.

So what I came up with in making sure that A be solved for that and B, people have a really clear journey or a way that they know that they can progress in their journey to become the best.

Let's say GTM Professional is what I call the builder ladder.

Now the problem that you present is that, okay, people, they come on, come in from all these different points.

Maybe they've been through a cohort or they've seen a webinar, found a piece of content, or they built their first clay table, you name it.

And there's no clear system to help them to keep learning.

Now a couple ways that I think that can be solved.

Now we'll start with with the journeys that I believe should be role based.

Now that can be.

So I have three here.

There are more of course, but for example, SDR comes in, they should have their own learning journey based on what an SDR should be learning how to do with clay.

Then maybe later they get promoted and now they are in a sales leadership role and they maybe need to hire GTM professional, GTME professionals and they should learn about that.

They should learn even more about system thinking and what makes a good GTM engineer, et cetera.

And that's something that there's a new track or new journey for that.

And that way everyone has a clear journey that they're on and they know, okay, I can sort of like orbit around it because people are busy and they're going to be solving their main use case and they're going to learn something and they're going to go back to doing their job and then later they should be able to easily jump back in.

And how we keep track is using the build a ladder, meaning that we can easily see, as you already laid it out, from 0 to 100, where they are, that is obviously done through checkpoints and different certificates.

but for every person that is personalized to their role, making it very easy for them to just learn relevant things to keep track of where they are.

And how we keep those credentials, let's say relevant or how we keep them current is by obviously thinking more in.

Okay, yes, you should be shipping things because in the end, you are what you've shipped and you should be able to build things.

But these days with the clay, mcp, cli, etc, you can even do that without being just very good at building.

But you obviously need to understand the systems behind it and let's say engineering decisions on okay, why do I choose method A not method B?

And in my experience the best way to teach that is through cases, which is also something done in business school.

For example, CLAY already has some really, really impressive case studies, for example from Anthropic.

And I just made this up.

Like how Anthropic rebuilt is SDR motion with AI, for example, that could be a live case.

And the reason why I believe cases are very important is that if you're looking at some of the best operators in the space, like Eric and Jordan, etcetera, and plenty of others, they got really good by doing things and having all these different life cases that came to them and said, hey, I'll pay you money to solve it for me.

They've solved it and that's how they now can solve the next case as well, by actually solving life cases.

So by going into these different life cases, we can teach people the system thinking and the critical decision making that was behind it and that's how we solved it.

It can be in a couple different ways.

So the tactical part of it we can obviously solve and we can say, okay, these are all the decisions that we made.

This is why we made them.

This is how we built it.

Now you go and build it in clay and we will use AI to grade it, for example, or we can actually give them the clay builds as well.

They can dissect them, they can look at them and they can see, okay, here's you know how we built this out for Anthropic.

Let's have a look at it.

And then that way we can learn from how they did it, then we learn the decision making, we learn the actual practical application as well.

And, and now we have that.

And then in the certificate, in the certification, for example, we can present them with something similar and they can solve it that way.

a great way to do that is because obviously there's the issue of if the exam is always the same, people will solve for it and the question like the answer will start floating around.

We can use AI to take their business or famous business to generate unique take homes that they have to solve.

That can be wrong, but they need to showcase the right thinking, etc.

Maybe even present their prompts rather than tables and their thinking, their methods.

And we can have different AI or role playing models that can score that and just judge them that way.

So life cases are more timeless and that's why I believe that they are really good in helping people think in the right way and think in systems.

Then as for the homepage now, if they want to go deeper, there are specific tracks for their roles as I said earlier.

But obviously people, they often come in to solve a specific problem, right?

so they may be thinking, okay, I want to try the new clay ads future because I've heard great things, let me see how to set that up.

Or my, you know, my VP of sales told me that we have to try signal campaigns.

Let me see how I can set that up.

Once that is done, they can then think, okay, great, there's actually a specific track for me for my role.

That's great because I have this set up.

I'm sure there's a lot more I can do.

Let me see how else I can do.

Get better at, you know, at my job.

And then ideally that is tied to one, identity, their personal LinkedIn profile, their personal email.

Because then that way as they move throughout, through different jobs in their career, they can take all of that with them, the certificates with them and they can actually showcase that GitHub style and say okay, I'm applying for this job.

Here's my clay profile.

You can see all the things I've shipped, maybe open source builds that I've done, credentials that I've earned.

And then it's just a lot easier to make that part of that, that full hiring journey by giving them a public profile they can use for that.

And there's different evidence that I looked at, from my own, like I went through all the support channel, my own clay, MBA teachings, etc.

Those are just let's say some sources that I looked at different things to help me, arrive at these conclusions.

So hope that's helpful.

Very, excited and happy to dive into it deeper in our next conversation, but I believe this is the right way of going about it for when it comes to actually teaching people how to be better at GTM engineering with practical applications that they can just apply to their job from day one, build things that are specific for that job from day one, and learn from live cases.

So the certification program can just be always on.

they can always dive back in and they know exactly where they stand.