My experience with CBE (Certified Blockchain Expert) Certification

Today I successfully completed my second blockchain certification i.e. Blockchain Council’s Certified Blockchain Expert aka CBE. First was BTA’s Certified Blockchain Business Foundation aka CBBF. In this post, I will share my experience with CBE training and exam.

Who can enroll?

CBE course is one of the foundational course provided by Blockchain Council. There is no prior experience/pre-requisite required to take this course. Anyone who wants to get themselves familiarize in field of Blockchain (or start career) can enroll to the course.

Curriculum

Course is self-paced with videos and pdf material. It starts with basics (Hashing, Centralized vs Distributed vs Decentralized systems etc.) and evolution of Blockchain. Gradually it deep-dives into Blockchain Ecosystem, tokens, Mining, Consensus etc. Course ends with detailed discussion on real world applications of Blockchain. (Complete list is available here)

Course videos are ranges from 10 to 20 minutes on average. One video was around 43 minutes long, which I guess was longest of them all. I found it comfortable running them at speed to 1.25x speed.

PDF material link will be available at end of video list. Personally I didn’t go through PDF material for study. It looked same as that of what being narrated in videos.

Unfortunately there is no lab or playground present for Hands-on. Labs would have been great addition to the curriculum.

Study Experience

Video’s bit monotonous as they were not recorded by real trainer but was TTS. I personally prefer recording of human trainer, as most TTS are rather “dry” and makes me yawn. Anyways this is personal preference and nothing to do with content.

I found multiple occurrences where repetition happened, particularly in Mining and Consensus modules. I understand that these are important concept, but repeating same lines twice or thrice doesn’t help much. Extra elaboration could have helped.

Some topics were really well presented and taught Blockchain Ecosystem, Other consensus mechanisms. Rest were okayish. Some of the concepts were not touched such as GAS in Ethereum, not sure why. I studied those with external resources such as Binance Academy and YouTube.

There are no surprise test or end-of-module short test present. Presence of those would have kept me engaged in training.

Exam

Exam is of total 100 marks. 60+ marks required for clearing exam. They provide maximum 3 retakes if you flunked in exam. Exam duration is of 90 minutes.

Exam format is of Multiple Choice Question. Some will be Single Answer MCQs, some will be Multi-answer MCQs.

Exam is directly conducted by Blockchain Council. Hence there is no need to schedule the exam, nor there will be any proctoring happens like Pearson Vue exams. Also unlike Pearson Vue, no software will downloaded to your PC to close other apps and launch exam. Entire exam will be carried in Browser itself. So you can give on PC, Laptop, Tablet even on Mobile device too :D

What does it take to clear exam?

It is difficult to speculate which module has higher weightage in-terms of questions, as no such bifurcation has been provided by Blockchain Council. Hence going through video material at least once, understanding core concepts of Decentralized world and having idea of real world of blockchain implementation is enough to clear the exam. I would recommend to refer external resources if any concept is not clear from video itself.

I completed entire exam in within 15 minutes and got around 70 marks.

Cost

At individual level, self-paced training + certification cost around INR 11499 ($149). But with annual membership of $229, I received 30% discount. I took the membership as I am planning for some more certifications by this year.

Training material access will available for Lifetime. Also certificate is valid for lifetime too. So there is no need to renew it every 2–3 years.

Is CBE better than other certification?

Simply, I don’t know. I cannot compare CBE with other certifications, as I haven’t took those certifications. You can go ahead and look for comparison blogs written by some industry veterans. But what I can tell is that CBE has good course material for beginners.

Also from money perspective, it is fairly cheaper than some of the counterparts. So if you got tight pockets, CBE can be good option.

What’s Next?

I have also enrolled for Certified Blockchain Security Professional™ from Blockchain Council itself. Will complete it and share the similar review for that too. Till then, auf wiedersehen!!!