Getting Credit for What You Know: Knowledge Maintenance tests and certificates

EMC's Knowledge Maintenance program deploys two kinds of notification in an effort to keep you up-to-date in your Proven Professional subject areas:

• regular product-specific instruction, sent soon after products release
• twice yearly validation tests, sent in April and October

The product-specific courses happen on the product release cycle throughout the year. That means if 2012 has four releases relevant to your Proven speciality you will receive four Knowledge Maintenance notices. That number varies: you may receive more than four Knowledge Maintenance notices in a year, or you may not receive any.

Validation tests have a regular schedule.  We send test notifications a maximum of twice each year—in April and October—but only to those that received product-specific instruction from the Knowledge Maintenance Program. If you received Knowledge Maintenance mailings at any time during the last six-month period, you should receive an e-mail notification with a link to the test for that track.

Self-validation and Reward

April & October Validation Tests

Regular validation tests help you confirm your knowledge of recent product releases, and let you review the content for things you may have forgotten. They also provide you the opportunity to earn a Knowledge Maintenance Certificate of Completion.

If you receive a KM test link, here's what you can expect:

• Links to all the Knowledge Maintenance content you received in the previous six months
  Don't worry if you haven't taken the courses prior to receiving the Test notification or if you want to review the course materials before taking the test: we include the previous content links so you can easily find the content you need for test preparation.
  
• Question content drawn from courses released during the prior six months
  The questions will generally be unique to the Knowledge Maintenance program and should focus on the most important product updates from the Knowledge Maintenance courses you received during that six-month period.
  
• A variable number of questions: 4 per product-specific course
  A Knowledge Maintenance validation test contains 4 questions for each of the courses sent to you during that six-month period. For example, if you received four courses the test for that period would have 16 questions. A test might have as few as 4 questions if there is only one course released during that period.
  
• Infinite retests until you pass
  The important thing for Knowledge Maintenance is that you know the content. This is not high-stakes testing in the way that a Proven Exam is, and you are allowed to retake the test until you pass it.
  
• A certificate, emailed automatically when you pass
  For each KM test you complete, you will receive a certificate of completion. This is an official document that confirms that you completed a particular Knowledge Maintenance bundle, and that lets you show that you've kept your knowledge current.
  
• CertTracker credit for completing the bundle
  Once you pass the validation test, the Knowledge Maintenance bundle will be marked as complete in your CertTracker account.

Troubleshooting

If you take a Knowledge Maintenance assessment test and pass, you should receive the certificate within a day or two and your CertTracker account should be updated. If you pass the test but do not receive the certificate, it may mean that you have more than one Powerlink account, or that your e-mail address is somehow not correct in the EMC Proven Cert Tracker portal.

If you think you earned a certificate but have not received it, please write to EdServices@emc.com with details of which test you took and when. If possible, include a copy of the Knowledge Maintenance e-mail you received so we can see the hyperlink you used to register for the test.