The next step in mastering Grasshopper? Getting certified of course!
Any updates on when the Grasshopper Certified Specialist exam will be available?
Would love to know!
I am curious to know where it is useful ?
1 Like
I remember throwing that idea out there last year…
I really wish I had a legit trainer when I struggled with Grasshopper as a beginner. Personally, I prefer structured, high-quality tutorials with clearly defined topics for each session so i can index based on my questions. When I was learning Autodesk Fusion, these kinds of tutorials saved me a lot of time and helped me reach a comfortable level where I could explore on my own. Fusion360 provided a solid foundation for beginners for sure, we even got a instructor from Autodesk for a morning, I learnt so quickly and did my final thesis with it.
1 Like
Does this newly posted course on rhino3d.education help? It includes structured learning with support.
2 Likes
I think the point of becoming certified only matters if you solve a task which itself yields a certified product or if your local bureaucracy wants you to do a job in a regulated fashion. Without any regulation, a certificate will only tell another person that you received official training and maybe solved a relative simple test at the end. Of course there are also really hard certificates out there, but then it could be that a really good developer might not pass this certificate, just because of the effort it takes to pass it. So what I’m thinking is that certificates tell you very little about the skill a person has. Additionally, if I would read that an applicant emphasis on collecting certificates, I would also be a bit suspicious. Thinking out-of-the-box is a skill you rather need nowadays. But its my personal opinion, and maybe the majority thinks different…
5 Likes
I 200% agree with that, generally speaking I really don’t perceive certifications as “business cards”, especially in a broad field like the many possible applications of gh… I’d rather see certifications as more of a “guarantee” that someone has a basic understanding of methods, data structures, workflows etc
the thing of knowing the software itself says very little about a person’s real ability to solve problems: despite stuff always having some sort of geometric foundation, their complexity can be abstracted far beyond that
being PyCharm certified won’t make me less noob in python 
2 Likes
I see your points, and I actually agree, certifications don’t necessarily reflect real skill, and I wouldn’t rely on them alone to judge someone’s ability. My initial thought came up simply because there’s already a precedent with the Rhino certification, so I was curious about how it would apply to Grasshopper, especially considering beginners who might not know where to start.
Of course, those of us who’ve been around the forum for a while already know who’s truly skilled
if @TomTom ever hosted a workshop, I’d sign up without hesitation, certificate or not! 
But again, my intention was never to push for a certification program, just to explore the idea based on the existing Rhino precedent.
1 Like
woo thx! I will recommend it to my students (I already passed the stage of figuring out the data structures but this will be super useful for my babybirds!
I forgot to mention that, as someone who is in the academic industry, I’d like to seek someone with a certification to teach the students, if myself don’t have time/energy or the capability to teach another course.
I know there are a lot GH “experts” that have tremendous knowledge of math/algorithm/data management for their own projects, but I need to find someone trustworthy by McNeel to bring a structured tutorial to the students so they don’t waste their time or loose the passion of learning parametric design.
2 Likes
Its not my job to teach people, but from time to time I “ramp-up” junior developers to learn the right things to become senior developers faster and to be useful in projects.
If people are “wasting time or not” or if they develop a “passion” for certain topics, is a matter of motivation.
You can not motivate all the people, but motivation is super important for faster and better learning in programming. It can be counterproductive if you find a good technical (and certified) person to teach, which lacks soft-skills. On the other hand, a not-so-expert teacher (e.g. a former student), can be a much bigger motivator to your students.
Motivation is also quickly lost if people feel overwhelmed quickly. Its a feeling which never really goes away, but you learn to deal with it.
There is no 2-4-6 weeks course, and then people can be expert. This is a misconception I constantly see from junior developers when the join right after the university. However you can really show in this period of time, that it might not be as hard as they think it is. The key is to teach the right principles in a easy-to-follow and interesting way. This has little to do with the actual technology.
I would even claim that “Parametric Design”, “Computational Design”, etc. are buzzwords from 10 years ago which make something not-that-hard to sound much more complicated. In the end you automate CAD work with a visual scripting editor.
1 Like
I agree with you that motivation is key. But unluckily I’ve seen passionate students lose passion because they were overwhelmed by messy tutorials or rebuilding and debugging some code snippets. Sometimes their entire workflow ends up being shaped around a workaround or a corner-case solution.
I always encourage them to click through every tab and component just to see what they do, and tons of examples. They usually pick things up quickly looking at pre-built cases. But actually building the workflow for their own projects is a whole different story especially when they don’t even have a solid understanding of the basics.
That’s why I see real value in certified trainers—not because certification automatically makes someone an expert, but because it often means they’ve taken the time to think through how to teach in a clear, accessible, and progressive way, especially data management. It’s also crucial to introduce students to proper data management early on. It’s not the most exciting part for them, and it confuses them a lot, it’s often where things fall apart when they try to implement a new workflow.
Of course, that doesn’t mean certification is everything. And btw, in my case, I don’t work with CAD or form-finding, we’re dealing with large data feeds and different sensor inputs for simulation purpose, GH is also just part of our pipeline that processes data in an easier way for students to understand as it is node-based. So the fundamental knowledge, like data clarity and data structure, are even more crucial to help them process abstract concepts efficiently.