Every AIHR Certificate Program ends with a Capstone Project made up of two components: a capstone assignment and a capstone exam. Its purpose is to help learners prove the skills they’ve learned. The assignment lets them apply what they’ve learned in a realistic setting, and the exam checks their understanding of the theory behind it.
It’s 100% online and self-paced, and learners can start it once they’ve completed all the coursework in their program.
Only the exam is required to earn a certificate. The assignment is optional, but it’s a good way to prepare for the exam. Together, the two parts take about two hours (around 60 minutes for the assignment and 50 minutes for the exam), and there’s no time limit for completing either one.
What is the capstone assignment?
The capstone assignment is a practical exercise that brings together everything covered in the certificate program, usually through a case study or a specific project, and the content varies by program.
Each assignment is built to feel realistic. It provides learners with company context, a defined role, stakeholders, and in some cases, dummy data to work with, so they don’t need a live organization or real company data to complete it. Assignments typically take one of two common formats:
- Interactive scenario (most common): Learners work through a set of problems as an HR professional at a fictional company, with feedback on the right approach built in, such as explanations after multiple-choice answers or card-sorting exercises.
- Data or dashboard project: In People Data and Business Insights, for example, learners build a Power BI dashboard from a dataset and answer questions based on it.
The assignment is self-reviewed, and has no score, passing mark, or human reviewer. Learners compare their results with the solution videos and information, and they can share their completed assignments in the community to compare answers and exchange feedback with other learners.
The feedback learners get is general rather than personalized, and shows them the right and wrong approaches without tailoring them to each learner’s specific answers.
What is the capstone exam?
The capstone exam is 40 multiple-choice questions, each with a single correct answer. The questions cover the learning across all the courses in the certificate program. Learners should set aside about 50 minutes for this component.
A 70% score is required to pass and earn each learner their certificate. If they don’t pass the first time, they can retake the exam as many times as they need, at any time, over the course of their access period.
Learners see their scores as soon as they finish the exam. They also get feedback that explains why a certain answer was wrong, without giving them the correct one. The exam evaluates learners’ knowledge of the program content, and is the theory counterpart to the practical assignment.
What happens after you finish the AIHR Capstone
Once a learner passes the exam, they’re taken to a page where they can email the digital certificate to themselves, and it arrives within 24 hours. They can then add it to their professional profile as proof of their new expertise and share it on LinkedIn.
AIHR Certificate Programs are available individually for $1,125 each, which gives learners 12 months of access. They’re also available as part of Full Academy Access, which unlocks all 16+ Certificate Programs and 85+ Courses for $1,850 per year. Browse all the AIHR Certificate Programs to see which one best fits your next HR professional development goal.
