CompTIA launched a new e-commerce store—the CompTIA Marketplace—late last month, which looks to not only give users a better shopping experience but also provide them with more customized career resources.

“Customers will find new features and upgrades that streamline the shopping experience whether they’re looking for certification exam vouchers, best-in-class CompTIA courseware and learning content, or courseware and exam bundles,” said CompTIA CIO Randy Gross in a press release.

The marketplace, built with a heightened user experience in mind, has been in the works for about six months and had a soft launch in mid-May.

Steven Ostrowski, CompTIA’s director of corporate communications, said it was important that the association got this website right for a number of reasons. Among them was that people now expect a certain online shopping experience.

“They’re so comfortable doing it if you throw up roadblocks or problems, make it too difficult to navigate, or too challenging to do the ordering, you’re probably not going to have repeat customers coming back,” he said.

Increased security concerns and the creation of more CompTIA content related to its certifications also prompted the store’s launch.

“CompTIA has really expanded its foray into test-preparation content and training materials, practice tests, online tutorials and things like that, so our offerings in terms for preparing for the exam are a lot more robust than they were just a year ago,” Ostrowski said.

In addition to offering a streamlined user experience, the new site also offers career path resources that help people determine what certifications are relevant to their career choices and where they want to go in the next five or 10 years.

To create this career path filter, CompTIA relied on surveys and focus groups with its certification holders. Ostrowski thinks of it like a road map: “This is where you start, this is where you can go, and these are the things you need to accomplish along the way to get to where you want to go, so it’s really aimed at two audiences—the people who are interested in tech and don’t know much about it, and those who are in the field already and want to keep advancing in their career.”

The new marketplace, and particularly the career path filter, are an outgrowth of CompTIA’s mission. “Part of our mission is to keep the pipeline field with well-educated, well-trained, well certified tech workers … so we hope we’ve made it easier for people to do business with us and to interact with us when it comes time to get some additional training or certifications in their careers,” Ostrowski said.

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