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I recently went through the certification process for Sitecore CDP & Sitecore Personalize. I did not enrol instructor-led training session but instead just plowed through all available material online. In this post I'm simple going to loosely organize and share all of the resources that I found helpful.
CDP stands for Customer Data Platform. It's a SaaS-based true centralized store for customer information. It's a little different than a CRM because it's a platform built for action that gathers information at the micro (searches, page views, add to cart) and macro (purchases, goals) level.
Sitecore Personalize leverages the data captured by CDP to deliver targeted experiments and experiences to users.
That's a good question. There is a distinction between them but they are integrated and accessed from within the same platform / interface. I log into one place and access both seamlessly. They were once positioned as single platform (known then as Boxever, acquired by Sitecore) but have since been segmented to maximize their audience. There is a use case for CDP without Personalize but I'd expect they're used together 99.99% of the time.
Kiran Patils has created a very useful mind map to help tie the concepts together. When you're learning there are concepts that are similar but different and this will help keep you sorted.
Within Sitecore Stack Overflow there are a few tags created specifically for CDP and Personalize that are promoted during the training. Sitecore has even asked and answered some common questions here to get the ball rolling.
There are also resources made available through Sitecore's learning portal for Sitecore partners. I'm not a customer or affiliate so I can't speak for their availability for people in those roles. The way the portal is built, I cannot link to them directly but I'll list the available offerings below.
To learn about CDP and Personalize, you really need access to it. Nothing can replace hands-on learning. Reach out to your local Sitecore partner or alliance manager and ask for access to a sandbox. There are no free trials or self-service
The certification exam is proctored through Web Assessor. In the Sitecore partner portal there was a discount code available at the time of this post. The exam was 30 questions, multiple choice, 60 minute time limit. I suspect the exam is much easier if you've taken the instructor-led course.
Thanks for reading. I hope you found this post useful. Sitecore CDP & Personalize do seem like great tools and a significant change of pace for the traditional Sitecore XP stack. If you find any additional resources that I should add please find me online I'll do my best to keep this updated.
