GitLab University is GitLab's training platform, and it is more practical than most. The catalogue covers the whole product: Git basics, CI/CD pipelines, security scanning, package and container registries, project management and GitLab Duo, the AI layer. Many courses are free, and the writing is clear and to the point. What sets it apart is the certification design. The technical associate exams are two-part.
You answer a short written exam, around 15 questions with an 80 percent pass mark, and then you complete and submit a hands-on lab in a GitLab demo cloud where you actually create a project and build on it. Retakes on the written part are unlimited. At $150 per exam that is good value, and it is one of the few vendor programmes besides Workato, Tealium and Pega's LSA that examines real work. The weak spot is the written section itself, which is so short it barely tests anything; the lab is doing most of the work. The AI side is where it has changed most.
GitLab has moved Duo from a separately priced add-on to usage credits attached to a GitLab plan, and the training has followed the product toward agents. The Certified GitLab Duo Agent Platform Associate covers agentic chat, configuring and publishing custom agents, and AI-assisted code creation, review and security workflows. That is a more realistic picture of where AI coding is going than the usual prompt-tips course, and the fact that it is certified with the same lab-based approach is a plus. What I missed is any serious treatment of the risks. When agents open merge requests, fix vulnerabilities and write tests, the questions that matter are who reviews that code, how you stop a flood of plausible but wrong changes, and what happens to your security posture when the thing writing fixes is the same system flagging the problems.
GitLab, which sells the agents and bills per credit, is not well placed to teach restraint about using them, and the course mostly does not try. Search interest in GitLab certification is down about a third year on year in dataforseo, which I read partly as GitHub consolidating mindshare and partly as developers caring less about forge-specific credentials. That makes this a certification to take because your employer runs GitLab, not one to collect speculatively. My take: a genuinely useful academy with sensible, lab-based certification at a fair price, and a better than average AI track. Just bring your own scepticism about agent-written code.