New Public Workspace: Now You Can Take API Trainings in Postman

Sue Smith

February 26, 2021· 4 mins

There really is no end to the subject matter you can learn and teach when it comes to APIs. For the first day of the Postman Galaxy virtual API conference in early February 2021, we ran a series of training sessions touching on some core topics. The trainings covered API and Postman essentials, diving into scripting, automation, API adoption, and working in an API-first lifecycle. Trainers walked participants through the learning experience inside Postman, and a team of Postmanauts provided support along the way. We’ve been delighted to award hundreds of Postman badges from these training experiences—which you and your team can now take at any time by using the Postman Galaxy Training public workspace.

Initial training topics

For this initial foundation of Postman trainings, we aimed to cover a few key areas that are most relevant to the Postman community:

• APIs 101 Training: Learn API basics. This is for those who are completely new to APIs, maybe at the beginning of their tech learning journey, or because they’re in an API-adjacent, non-technical role (e.g., product management, business, marketing, or team).
• Testing and Automation Training: Learn how to utilize test scripts in your Postman requests, carry out essential test configurations on your responses, and build automation using the Postman Collection Runner with scripted workflows.
• API Adoption Training: Learn how to use Postman to build for user onboarding with public-facing APIs, generate documentation, use mock servers, utilize dynamic data, and visualize data with charts and graphs for more accessible consumption.
• API-First Training: Learn how to adopt an API-first lifecycle by starting from an OpenAPI Specification inside Postman and generating collections for testing, mocking, and documentation, and validating generated collections against your schema as a single source of truth.

A self-serve learning experience

Over the past few months, we’ve used the Postman Student Program to trial automated learning inside Postman with the Student Expert training. Building on the success of this program, we decided to take a similar approach when creating the training supports for Postman Galaxy.

This new Postman training workspace provides the resources for learners to conduct self-directed, self-paced learning inside Postman. Keeping the learning in context helps to reduce the barriers we sometimes encounter, for example by having to refer to documentation, videos, and other support resources outside the request-building environment.

We’ve used automation in the training experiences so that we can make these opportunities available at scale, avoiding the need for learners to wait for synchronous feedback, and enabling them to drive their own learning forward independently.

The training material is all completely remixable, so you are welcome to repurpose it for use within your own team or project. Aside from the Postman workspace resources, the trainings use backend APIs built on Glitch, in public projects you can see, copy, and tweak to suit your own needs.

Training badges awarded upon completion

We’ve been thrilled to see how popular the Postman Student Expert badges have been on LinkedIn, and so we’ve created a load of new badges to recognize these additional learning experiences. Each completed training comes with an award in the form of an Open Badge, which learners can share all over the web and add as credentials on LinkedIn (we use the Badgr platform, which also empowers recipients to share their awards)–and a Discourse badge which displays on Postman Community forum member profiles.

Next steps for Postman trainings

These trainings represent an experimental foundation of learning and credentialing that we hope will grow into a comprehensive education program that enables people around APIs on a mass scale—to help individuals and teams access opportunities around the world. Future developments will include many more topics covering API literacy, working with customers and partners to help their users onboard with specific technologies, and pathways connecting learners to additional topics. We hope you’ll use Postman’s new trainings with your team, project, or community—let us know in a comment below if you need help getting started!