Standardize your team on Certified Kubernetes Application Developer with a structured Kubernetes training path — a blueprint-weighted practice exam and team admin reporting included on every CBT Nuggets Teams seat.
Exams
Exam fees per engineer, paid to the exam vendor$445
Every engineer on the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer path takes CKAD.
Skills your team builds
Training path
One CBT Nuggets course covers the full Certified Kubernetes Application Developer path. Your team can start today and have admin reporting visible from day one.
Kubernetes career ladder
The cert your team is on now, plus the levels above and below. Use this to map an engineer's next-step credential or to plan headcount coverage across tiers.
CKA
CKAD
CKS
Assign the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer course to the engineers who need it, and the team report shows who has started, who has finished, and who has passed the practice exam — the view leadership uses to see Kubernetes skills coverage across the team and where the gaps are.
Team capability
Standardizing your team on CKAD gives leadership a clear picture of Kubernetes skills coverage — who has completed the training, who is still on the path, and where the gaps are — so staffing and escalation plans rest on known capability instead of on one engineer.
Credential: Certified Kubernetes Application Developer
Common questions IT directors ask when evaluating Certified Kubernetes Application Developer training for their team.
Teams often cite CKAD when documenting that the engineers who deploy and configure workloads on Kubernetes, including handling Secrets and ConfigMaps, hold a validated credential. CBT Nuggets team reporting adds per-learner progress, completion, and completion exports that can serve as audit evidence for that training coverage, while the auditor's control crosswalk decides any formal framework mapping.
IT leaders typically assign CKAD to the application developers, DevOps engineers, and platform engineers who ship workloads onto clusters. The linked course prepares them to own application pod deployments on Amazon EKS and multi-architecture K3S clusters, container image builds with Shipwright, and manifest linting inside CI/CD pipelines. It also covers ConfigMap and Secret configuration, probes and health checks, and pod scheduling with taints and PriorityClass resources.
CBT Nuggets Certified Kubernetes Application Developer courses are built by named expert trainers. Where a course includes hands-on virtual labs or a practice exam mapped to Kubernetes's published exam objectives, the course list on this page says so. Team admin reporting tracks assignment, completion and exam readiness per engineer — the view managers use to run a team training program.
From the admin console, managers assign the Certified Kubernetes Application Developer courses directly to specific engineers or role groups and track completion and practice-exam scores per learner. Team-wide reporting rolls up to a single dashboard you can review or export for leadership reviews or compliance reporting.
The linked CBT Nuggets training totals about 47 hours of video, which gives IT leaders a planning baseline for each engineer on the roadmap. Actual time to certify depends on the team's starting point, such as how much hands-on Kubernetes and container experience each engineer already brings.
CBT Nuggets updates Kubernetes course content as exam objectives refresh, and this page shows the current exam's status and any retirement date the vendor has announced. When Kubernetes restructures or renames a track, the assigned training stays aligned with the same team training plan, and the training stays current without anyone losing their progress mid-stream.
