Mercury Certified Instructor Exam and Workshop

The Mercury Certified Instructor qualification is not about having mastery over the Mercury toolset (although if you are sitting for the CI exam, you probably have this anyway); it is about ensuring that you have the ability to effectively deliver training material to a classroom of students.

Officially, Mercury training must be delivered by someone who has a CI qualification and the appropriate CPC qualification for the tool that they are delivering the training for. In practice, there aren’t enough Certified Instructors yet, so this is not enforced.

After wanting to do it for a while, I completed the Mercury Certified Instructor training and passed the exam in December 2005 (making me the only non-Mercury employee technically allowed to deliver the LoadRunner training in Australia).

The course is run by the instructor according to the same teaching theories that are taught in the course (which I am rather embarrassed to admit I didn’t fully realise until the afternoon of the first day). The first two days run through all the theory, and the third day is dedicated to the final exam – presenting a module of Mercury training in a way that will satisfy all the grading criteria.

Even though I had presented the training module before, presenting it while remembering to “create a non-threatening environment”, “address multiple learning modes”, and “exhibit energy and enthusiasm” was like juggling and spinning plates at the same time.

The final exam was one of the hardest I have ever done, despite my previous teaching experience delivering Mercury training and as a class tutor for 1st year university C++ and Digital Design subjects.

The only people in the class who managed to make it seem effortless were a former teacher and a Mercury employee who has run hundreds of Mercury training courses.

I highly recommend this course to anyone who is interested in teaching others how to use the Mercury toolset, although the concepts can easily be applied to any training situation.