Arduino Offers "Certified Engineer" Qualifications Through Its New Arduino Academy Program

Fresh from the launch of a range of courseware, Arduino has announced a major upgrade to its educational offerings with Arduino Academy — a planned series of self-paced courses through which you can become an official Arduino Certified Engineer.

"Capitalizing on Arduino’s extensive experience in the education space and the success of the industrial-grade professional products in the Arduino Pro range, the Arduino Academy offers self-paced courses that facilitate deep learning with hands-on labs," the Arduino team says of the launch. "Designed for all skill levels, it provides certifications and badges for LinkedIn integration and allows progress tracking, flexible navigation, and personalized learning paths."

The Academy launches with Opta Essentials ACE-100, building on the courseware developed for use with the Arduino PLC Starter Kit and its bundled Arduino Opta WiFi micro PLC. The course covers concepts through to real-world use-cases, including a bottle-filling conveyor system, and is designed for use with a hardware bundled dubbed the Opta Trainer Kit — a separate package to the existing Arduino PLC Starter kit, with different hardware.

The course lasts around 16 hours, Arduino says, and covers the use of both the Arduino IDE and the PLC IDE in all five IEC 61131-3 programming languages. While it's designed for those looking for a starting point for learning about the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Arduino claims it has been designed for "a broad audience" ranging from professional embedded engineers to students.

ACE-100 is freely available on the Arduino Academy site, with additional courses to follow in the near future.