As a software developer at Glendale Community College (GCC), Karri Sisson believes in continuous learning. “Any programming class improves your skills as a developer because you can always pick up new concepts or ways to apply them to your current work,” she says.

So, when Sisson first heard about Pega Systems Architect Essentials, she was intrigued.

Wanting to learn more, Sisson tried to learn the program on her own, but after a few modules, she realized it would be best to enroll in a class and chose Mesa Community College’s fast-track Pega certification program.

“Having a live instructor available to ask questions during lectures and help guide me through the hands-on labs really made the difference,” she said. “Even though I attended the class 100% remotely, the labs were set up so that I could access them and practice any time I had internet access, no matter where I was.”

The Pegasystems Architect Essentials course prepares students to take the Pega System Architect Certification exam and become a Pega Certified System Architect (PCSA). However, as Sisson explains, the exam isn’t so easy.

“This was one of the hardest IT certification exams I have ever taken,” said Sisson. “You can’t just have a basic knowledge of Pega. You have to be able to take that knowledge and apply it. Just knowing how to build an app in Pega will not be enough to pass the exam and just having the classroom lecture knowledge is not enough. You have to fully understand and apply what you learned in class to the app building, which is achievable by understanding the processes that are happening as you practice in the labs.”

By the end of class, Sisson says she understood why so many companies have moved to a Pega architecture for building customer-facing apps and forms.

Now that Sisson is a Certified Pega System Architect, she will join her MCC instructor, Michael Bogner in teaching the Pega System Architect Essentials class at MCC, while maintaining her current position at GCC.