“It’s a lot of memorization and quite honestly was one of the hardest tests I’ve ever taken. I took this test for the first time back in 2007 and you know, me being a 4.0 student back in high school, always getting good grades, when I saw my first practice test came back with like 25% correct, I knew that this was one that I was going to have to put a little more effort into.” ~Pat Flynn on the LEED exam.

Pat Flynn, creator of Green Exam Academy

I had a chance to go to San Diego recently for Social Media Marketing World. It’s a fantastic event with an unbelievable list of speakers. And it’s the only conference that I know of with a reception on an aircraft carrier. I learned a lot and got back home with a thousand ideas to try out. But the highlight of the trip was getting a chance to interview Pat Flynn who was speaking at the event. Pat’s an author, podcaster, blogger and creator of GreenExamAcademy.com a website that’s helped thousands of people pass the LEED exam. In 2007 Pat was working in an architecture firm and studying for the LEED exam. He started putting all of his notes online and eventually organized it all into a website. Now it’s a huge site with study guides, practice exams and classes. Thousands of people have used it to help prepare for the test.

DB: I’m here with Pat Flynn, founder of GreenExamAcademy.com, which is a website that helps you prepare for the LEED exam. So Pat, I’m sure a lot of people have heard the phrase LEED certified and they probably know almost nothing about what that means they know it has something to do with sustainability. Can you give us the background on that.

What is the LEED exam?

PF: Right, well LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design and it’s an accreditation that the United States Green Building Council can give to certain buildings that meet a certain requirement for, like you said,  sustainability and there are a lot of different categories related to things all the way from how the building is designed, to the energy use, to the water usage, all that sort of stuff. But you can kind of see it in two different ways. One, a building can be LEED certified, a building can have the efficiencies or meet the certain requirements to earn LEED certification and a lot of people use that who own a building or who access to buildings in terms of marketing. And it just shows that the environment was considered when the building was going up.

But my approach is more for the people who want to become LEED Accredited Professionals, and these are people who study for and then take an exam and pass it to be able to earn the right to work on a building. And a building, in order to to become LEED certified has to have someone who is a LEED AP, somebody who has passed this test, work on this, facilitate that discussion and become the liaison in between the United States Green Building Council and everybody who is working on it.

There’s a lot involved with putting a building up and making it LEED certified. But with the test specifically, which is what I work on most with people, through offering practice exams and study guides. It’s a lot of memorization and quite honestly was one of the hardest tests I’ve ever taken. I took this test for the first time back in 2007 and you know, me being a 4.0 student back in high school, always getting good grades, when I saw my first practice test came back with like 25% correct, I knew that this was one that I was going to have to put a little more effort into. So I built a website called Green Exam Academy to really focus on studying for this exam and exactly what we needed to memorize to pass, and 10s of thousands of people have ended up using my site, the free content on the site and some of the items that one can purchase, classes, practice exams to help them pass the test.