What are the responsibilities and job description for the Certification Program Manager position at DDN?
The Certification Program Manager will help build DDN's external certification program from the ground up, reporting to Enablement leadership. This role creates the structure, learning paths, assessments, credentialing experience, and operational model that help partners, customers, and field audiences demonstrate readiness on DDN solutions.
This is a role for someone who understands that certification is more than a course, a quiz, or a badge. It is a way to define what good looks like, help people build confidence, and create a consistent standard for readiness across the audiences DDN enables.
What This Role Is Here to Do
You will help turn DDN's product knowledge, solution expertise, technical depth, and go-to-market priorities into certification programs that are clear, credible, and useful. Much of the technical source content you build from comes from DDN's enablement team, including technical explainers and field-ready guides. Your job is to take that content and shape it into structured learning paths, assessments, and credentialing standards.
That means working with Enablement, Product, Product Marketing, Sales Engineering, Partner, and GTM stakeholders to define what learners need to know, what they need to be able to do, and how we will know they are ready. You will build certification experiences that can scale externally, including practical exercises, credentialing standards, and reinforcement models. The goal is not just completion. The goal is readiness that can be demonstrated, trusted, and applied.
What Success Looks Like
DDN has a certification program that is structured, credible, and easy to understand. Learners know what is expected. Partners and field teams can demonstrate readiness. Stakeholders have visibility into participation, completion, pass rates, and gaps. Certifications support real-world application, not just knowledge recall.
When this role is working well, certification becomes a trusted signal of readiness. It helps partners, customers, and field audiences understand DDN solutions more clearly, apply what they learn more consistently, and build confidence in how they position, support, and activate DDN in the market.
The Work You'll Lead
You will build DDN's certification program structure, including certification paths, learning objectives, assessment criteria, completion requirements, and credentialing standards. You will design assessments, knowledge checks, practical exercises, and certification rubrics that measure application, not just recall.
You will coordinate certification launches, communications, tracking, and stakeholder readiness so programs are adopted and maintained. Using LMS, enablement platform, and program data, you will track participation, completion, pass rates, and opportunities for improvement, and build the operating model that keeps certification programs current, scalable, and aligned to field, partner, and customer needs.
What You Bring
Experience building or managing certification, credentialing, learning, enablement, partner education, customer education, or technical training programs
Strong ability to structure learning paths, define readiness outcomes, and design assessments that measure whether people can apply what they have learned
Clear writing and content development skills, with the ability to turn complex inputs into organized, usable certification materials
Comfort working with subject matter experts and cross-functional stakeholders to gather input, validate accuracy, and keep programs moving
Understanding of how partners, customers, field teams, and managers use certification and training in real business contexts
Strong program management skills, with the ability to manage timelines, dependencies, governance, and reporting
Good judgment about what needs to be taught, tested, reinforced, measured, and maintained over time
We Build Together
We're a team that shows up for each other and for the field. We share what we know, ask good questions, and celebrate wins, big and small. DDN is building something real, and so are we.