Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer (PCEP™)

For IT Directors and Training Managers: Many IT teams rely on Python for scripting and automation, but those skills are often self-taught and inconsistent. Scripts work, yet they are hard to read, crash on unexpected input, and depend on one person to maintain them. This PCEP course gives your team a shared, standards-based Python foundation and an entry-level certification to validate it.

Role fit: The course is built for junior software developers and IT Practitioners with about a year of development exposure. It also suits sysadmins and support staff who need to read and write basic scripts. Object-oriented programming is out of scope and is covered in the follow-on PCAP course.

Time investment: The course has 26 skills, about 22 hours per learner. Most skills run under an hour and include short hands-on challenges followed by walkthrough solutions. Learners can progress in small blocks without stepping away from project work.

Risk and code quality: Lessons cover exception handling for user input and PEP 8 style guidelines. These help your team write code that fails gracefully and that peers can review and maintain.

Adoption: Project builds tie the concepts into complete programs before learners apply them on the job, including a word game and a budget tracker.

With CBT Nuggets, Team Leads can add this course to Playlists alongside follow-on Python training. Team Reporting lets them track progress and completion across the team.

IT teams use this training to move from copying scripts to writing and maintaining reliable Python code themselves. Each skill pairs instruction with short challenges, and the course closes with four console-based builds: a data manager, a word game, a password generator, and a budget tracker. These projects reflect the small internal tools IT practitioners are often asked to create.

• Fewer brittle scripts: Your team learns Python's built-in exceptions and try/except handling, so bad input or unexpected values are easier to account for before they interrupt a tool mid-run.
• Code others can maintain: Training on PEP 8 guidelines, with a hands-on code-cleanup challenge, helps Team Leads hold scripts to one readable standard and cuts the time spent deciphering a colleague's work.
• Faster tool building: Learners practice breaking larger jobs into functions, such as scrape data, clean data, and write data, and building a reusable menu-driven framework, as the budget tracker project shows. That makes routine automation quicker to deliver and simpler to extend.
• Confident data handling: Practice with Python data types and collection handling prepares your team to structure and transform the data their scripts work with.

For IT Directors, the result is a team with a shared, validated Python baseline that is ready for the PCEP exam and prepared to move on to the PCAP course.

Knowledge

• How Python syntax works, including indentation-based code blocks in place of curly braces, variables, and PEP 8 style guidance for readable, maintainable code
• How integers, floats, complex numbers, booleans, and alternative number notations behave in operations, including which operations are not defined for certain data types
• How control flow works with if/elif/else statements, for loops, and while loops that repeat until a condition is no longer true
• How lists, tuples, dictionaries, sets, and multi-dimensional lists store data, including slicing with start, stop, and step values and common list methods
• How functions, parameters, arguments, and variable scope fit together to organize larger programs into smaller tasks
• How exceptions differ from errors, how Python's built-in exceptions relate to the base Exception type, and how to retrieve exception details

Ability

• Write and run simple Python programs that use variables to solve practical problems, such as calculating a discounted price or travel time
• Use Python exception concepts to identify runtime issues and retrieve useful exception details
• Break complex workflows into clearly named functions that pass data in and return updated results
• Refactor existing code to follow PEP 8 recommendations so team code is easier to read and review
• Apply basic sorting algorithms and collection operations to manipulate and organize data
• Build console-based Python projects, including a word guessing game and a budget tracker