What is Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) certification?

Adobe Journey Optimizer is an agile, scalable application built on Adobe Experience Platform for orchestrating and delivering personalized, connected customer journeys across any app, device, screen, or channel. Whether it’s a scheduled, brand-initiated touchpoint like a weekly promotional email, or a real-time response to customer behavior, such as providing contextual updates on a recent purchase, Journey Optimizer helps marketers meet customers with the right message, at the right time, on the right channel.

By bringing data, content, and decision-making together in one place, Journey Optimizer gives brands the power to unify customer profiles, personalize content at scale, and automate interactions across the entire lifecycle. Marketers can respond to behavioral triggers in real time, refine campaign logic on the fly, and design seamless journeys that build trust, boost retention, and drive measurable results.

Adobe launched a Journey Optimizer Developer Expert certification in 2022 for our technical implementers, consultants, and partners to become Adobe Certified Professionals. By offering this certification, we’re helping connect our customers to valuable, vetted resources that will help them transition to simplified journey management for customers — no matter where or how they engage. For business professionals who want to demonstrate their skill at journey orchestration and crafting personalized customer journeys, Adobe also offers a Journey Optimizer Business Practitioner Professional certification.

In this guide:

• How Adobe Journey Optimizer certifications were built.
• Business Practitioner Professional certification.
• How to prepare for Business Practitioner certification.
• Developer Expert certification.
• How to prepare for Developer Expert certification.

Adobe designs and develops exams to industry standards for fair, valid, and reliable certification. Adobe Certified Professionals in Journey Optimizer possess the experience and skills to help our customers succeed. To ensure that the Adobe Journey Optimizer certification was comprehensive, we partnered with Bounteous, Capgemini, Merkle, and Wunderman Thompson, along with Adobe Consulting and Field Readiness, to develop it.

Building exams is a multistep process — it includes defining a target audience, documenting job tasks, creating questions, conducting a technical review, and determining a passing score. Through this process, we ensured that the exam for technical implementers of Journey Optimizer covers administration and configuration, Adobe Experience Platform foundation, offer decisioning, content authoring, and journey orchestration. Professionals who earn this customer journey certification demonstrate deep proficiency in helping organizations deliver personalized, real-time experiences across channels.

You can find more information on the Journey Optimizer Developer Expert exam preparation page.

Watch the video of how Adobe Journey Optimizer lets you orchestrate and deliver personalized customer engagement across all channels.

The Adobe Journey Optimizer Business Practitioner certification is designed for professionals who want to demonstrate their ability to manage and optimize personalized customer journeys using the real-time orchestration capabilities of Adobe Journey Optimizer. Whether you’re on the strategy side or the technical side, this customer journey certification validates the skills needed to plan, build, and execute cross-channel experiences that drive results.

While the Developer Expert certification is designed for technical team members who implement Journey Optimizer, here are some of the job roles that would benefit from Business Practitioner certification:

• Adobe Journey Optimizer business consultant
• Marketer
• Marketing automation business practitioner
• Campaign manager
• Campaign strategist
• Marketing automation specialist
• Journey manager
• Digital marketing specialist
• CRM coordinator
• Martech analyst
• Solutions consultant
• Technical consultant

Recommended skills for Business Practitioner certification.

Candidates can set themselves up for certification success with prior hands-on experience. Here are some of the tasks you should know how to do to prepare for the Business Practitioner Professional certification exam.

• Validate and proof a message and seed list.
• Create email, SMS, in-app messages, and push notifications using predesigned templates or drag-and-drop features.
• Test and validate journeys.
• Create journeys and campaigns (email, SMS, and push only) and add basic conditions and exclusions in the journey.
• Know basic personalization using profile attributes and event data.
• Use subscription lists.
• Review profile attributes and events (for example, load a profile in the UI).
• Understand and use landing pages.
• Understand when to use different types of journeys and campaigns and leverage the campaigns feature in Journey Optimizer for building a one-time email blast.
• Understand how to use data sources, events, and actions.
• Monitor and review journey reports to track email engagements, bounces, error rates, spam rates, and domains issues.
• Build and validate basic segment criteria.
• Understand email suppression and allow lists.
• Understand unitary and business events.
• Understand and use different activities in the journey.
• Learn basic debugging via test mode or reporting (no query service required).
• Gather and document journey requirements with the business.
• Know best practices around journeys and channels, for example, the best time to send, the best channel to use, best journey design patterns for different use cases, and when to use transactional and marketing messages.
• Understand deliverability concepts, for example, different bounces and warming.
• Understand frequency and fatigue rules.
• Preview datasets.
• Basic understanding of identities.
• Understand when to use audience composition and direct mail channels.
• Understand static and dynamic offer collections and simulation (testing offers).
• Compose an audience using a new audience composer.
• Import an audience (for example, upload a CSV audience).
• Upload and auto-convert HTML for email using the new HTML converter.
• Create a content experiment.
• Measure the results of a content experiment.
• Tag, filter, search journeys, campaigns, and more.
• Create a fragment from a template.
• Use custom actions.
• Create content in asset essentials.
• Connect to eternal data sources.
• Have a basic knowledge of offer decisioning.
• Have a basic understanding of experience data models (XDM).
• Monitor and review data imports and exports.
• Create a content template.
• Understand data usage and labeling concepts.

Preparing for the Adobe Journey Optimizer Business Practitioner certification means getting comfortable with the platform’s key capabilities — from building effective journeys to using data and content to personalize at scale. Adobe offers a free course to help you prepare for the Adobe Journey Optimizer Business Practitioner Professional exam.

Here’s a quick overview of what you’ll learn in each section:

Campaign and journey optimization (48%)

• Build, validate, and evaluate customer journeys based on specific scenarios.
• Know when to use unitary events versus business events.
• Understand journey performance metrics and how to optimize based on results.

Offer decisioning (12%)

• Create collections of offers and configure them correctly.
• Understand the stages of offer decisioning and how to apply them.
• Choose between offer decisioning or personalization at scale based on the use case.
• Identify when to use static versus dynamic offers.
• Use offer decision activities within authored content.

Content authoring (20%)

• Use Asset Essentials to manage creative elements.
• Add personalized fields to emails using dynamic data.
• Set up, configure, and interpret content experiments.
• Understand and use content fragments effectively.
• Build email templates that support scalable content production.

Foundations of Adobe Experience Platform (20%)

• Work with various data types and understand their application.
• Review profile attributes and audience membership.
• Differentiate between datasets enabled or not enabled for profile use.
• Understand identity types and when to apply them in journeys.
• Use logic for sequential audiences and troubleshoot data loading issues.
• Apply the correct data labels based on data sensitivity and governance requirements.

The Adobe Journey Optimizer Developer Expert certification is designed for technical professionals who build, configure, and troubleshoot real-time customer journeys across complex data environments. This certification validates a candidate’s ability to implement and maintain scalable, cross-channel experiences using advanced features of Journey Optimizer and Experience Platform.

Job roles in which Developer Expert certification is valuable.

• Data architect
• Data engineer
• Solution architect
• Enterprise architect
• Marketing automation developer
• CDP developer
• CDP architect
• Decision manager
• Campaign developer
• Deliverability consultant
• RTCDP segmentation specialist
• Campaign architect
• Customer journey specialist
• Mobile and web developer

What candidates should know.

Candidates ready to become Adobe Journey Optimizer Developer Experts should have at least one year of experience working with Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) and various marketing automation systems. They should also be able to guide the development and implementation from scratch, troubleshoot journeys, understand product limitations and guardrails, use advanced code, set templates, build custom actions, and follow best practices.

Journey Optimizer is powered by Experience Platform. It’s recommended that candidates complete training or have prior experience on Experience Platform or Real-Time CDP in addition to Journey Optimizer training. This free course from Adobe can help you prepare.

The Journey Optimizer Developer Expert exam features five technical competency areas. Here’s a summary of what candidates will need to learn:

Administration and configuration (20%)

• Understand user permissions and sandbox setup.
• Manage channels and configure data sources.
• Apply Journey Optimizer-specific APIs (for example, throttling, suppression, and object copy).
• Set up events and actions appropriately across journeys.

Journey orchestration (22%)

• Build multi-step, multi-channel journeys.
• Analyze reports and debug performance.
• Determine when to use each journey type.
• Create and manage test cases for experimentation.

Offer decisioning (16%)

• Create and manage offers, including offer components.
• Use test profiles to simulate and validate offers.
• Understand Offer Hub versus Edge API.
• Implement decision-making across different delivery channels.

Content authoring (22%)

• Build and validate content for email, SMS, push, and in-app messaging.
• Use personalization syntax and helper functions.
• Debug and publish journeys with confidence.

Data modeling (18%)

• Work with profile versus event-based schemas.
• Set up data ingestion and configure datasets.
• Understand the relationship between schemas and union schemas.
• Apply segmentation logic and manage identities effectively.

Get certified and started with Adobe Journey Optimizer.

The Adobe Certified Professional — Journey Optimizer Developer Expert and Business Practitioner Professional exams are now available. To learn more about exam qualifications, suggested preparation, and other considerations, visit the Journey Optimizer Developer Expert exam preparation guide.

Earning an Adobe Journey Optimizer certification gives both developers and business practitioners the practical skills they need to succeed in real-world roles. Whether you’re designing personalized customer journeys, managing complex data integrations, or driving smarter engagement strategies, certification proves you have the expertise to deliver impact at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Learn more about Adobe Journey Optimizer.