monday academy is organised into four sections, lessons, learning paths, certifications and training, and the free half of that works reasonably well. Lessons are short and focused on a single feature, running from basic navigation through to workflow automation, and they are on-demand so you can pick one up when you hit a specific wall rather than committing to a course. Learning paths string them into sequences. Webinars, live and recorded, sit alongside.
For someone who has just been handed a monday board and told to get on with it, an afternoon here is well spent. The certifications are where the value proposition falls apart. Work management core certification is $399. The API certification is $549.
Sales CRM is $199 and Admin is $199. There is no required coursework, which is to monday's credit, you can prepare with the free lessons and book the exam when you are ready, but the exam fees themselves are steep for what is being certified. Five hundred and forty nine dollars to certify API knowledge on a platform whose core selling point is that you do not need to write code is a number that deserves to be said out loud. Compare it against the market.
AWS, Microsoft and Google certifications, which carry actual recognition in hiring and cover far larger technical surfaces, sit well below that for their associate tiers. Asana and ClickUp give their credentials away entirely. What monday is charging for is recognition inside its own partner ecosystem, and if you are a partner agency that recognition may have commercial value. If you are an operations manager hoping the badge helps you switch jobs, it almost certainly will not.
The AI gap is the more interesting problem. Asana has built a three hour AI Studio foundations badge and a course on agentic workflow design. ClickUp has a full Advanced AI Skills path with an agents certificate. monday has AI features in the product and comparatively little structured teaching about them in the academy, which leaves customers to work out the boundaries of a probabilistic feature by experimenting in production.
That is exactly the situation training is supposed to prevent, and in a market where the two nearest competitors have both moved, the absence is conspicuous rather than merely unfortunate. Navigation is a minor but persistent irritation. The four-section split sounds tidy and in practice means the same material appears in several places under different framings, so you are never entirely sure whether you have already covered something. A single searchable catalogue with clear prerequisites would serve better than the current arrangement.
To be fair to the free material, it does what it sets out to do. The lessons are well made, short, and do not waste your time with an introduction to the concept of project management before showing you the feature. Somebody could go from confused to competent in a working day, which is the correct benchmark for this kind of training. Three point one.
Decent free lessons attached to a certification programme priced for a market position monday does not hold, with an AI gap that its two closest competitors have already filled.