Happy Friday, FME'ers! Welcome back to TGIF: Thank Goodness It's FME.
This week we're sitting down with Sam Walker, Senior Customer Education Manager here at Safe Software. Sam leads the team behind the FME Academy and the FME certification program, which makes him exactly the right person to ask a question we hear constantly: where should I actually start with FME? This is Part 1 of a two-week Q&A, covering the lay of the land — what's out there, who it's for, and how it all gets built. Let's hear from him!
Where to Start Learning FME
Sam's first answer, “rather selfishly,” is the FME Academy at academy.safe.com. The Academy organises content into structured learning paths based on your level of experience, so you can show up with no FME experience — and very little technical experience — and be guided through from the beginning.
But he's quick to spread the credit around. There's the documentation, reachable from the Help button or the Help menu. There's AI Assist inside the product for questions as they come up. There's the Support Center and Knowledge Base, where articles go into the nitty-gritty on a specific transformer, a specific format, or a specific use case in your industry. And there's community.safe.com, where you can ask knowledgeable FME users around the world. As Sam puts it, the Academy covers a lot at a high level; the Knowledge Base is where you go deep.
The Path for Someone Brand New
If you're starting from zero, Sam gives a specific order. Begin with the FME Accelerator, a 90-minute live workshop you attend online with an instructor who walks you through building a data integration workflow. He describes it as something like an interactive webinar — a quick tour of the product that still lets you get in and use it.
From there, Integrate Data with the FME Platform: two four-hour sessions covering how to build a workspace, the object that defines a data integration workflow, and how to publish it to the web with automations and apps on top. Then FME for Intermediate, which digs into topics like list attributes, adjacent feature analysis and schema management.
Accelerator, Integrate, Intermediate. Work through those three and, in Sam's words, you'll be ready to really use FME and should find success.
Certification, and When You're Ready For It
The certification program serves two audiences. For partners, it's a signal to the market — Safe Software has certified them, so customers can find skilled partners to work with. For customers, it's proof of skill, and Sam notes the team has heard many times that having FME Certified Professional or FME Flow Certified Professional on a resume helps people land roles using FME.
His advice on timing: use FME for a good while before you worry about getting certified, maybe a year or more of active use, and work through the training content first. The exam questions come directly from the training on the FME Academy, so it's exactly the right material to prepare with. Both exams require an application fee and a proctored exam — proctoring matters, Sam says, to keep things fair for everyone. There are also two partner-only certifications: FME Certified Trainer, which involves an audit of your training style, and FME Certified Sales Professional.
How Learning FME Has Changed
Safe had been delivering online training for about a decade before Sam joined, but before that it was in person — his colleague Ryan Cragg travelling out to customer offices to run training on site. Today you can join a course and get a virtual machine with the FME platform already installed and licensed, so you can get to work right away even if you don't have FME or the latest version. On-demand content has seen big demand too, with plenty of people completing learning paths and earning certificates in their own time.
The biggest shift, though, is AI. Customers are learning FME through chatbots — some using AI Assist in the product, some using third-party tools, some running local models they've deployed themselves. Sam's team is adapting: making content more accessible to AI and giving it the right context, so that when you ask a chatbot an FME question, it's working from the right information.
Watch the full conversation with Sam here!
That's a wrap on Part 1! Next week we're back with Part 2, where Sam shares his number one tip for new users, explains why the transformer list is less scary than it looks, and talks through where AI might be taking workspace authoring.
In the meantime, we'd love to know: what helped you most when you were learning FME? Drop it in the comments. Happy FMEing, everyone!