After taking more than 100 online exams as well as a practical three-day exam in Japan, Yunus Docrat, a branch technician at Bidvest company, Konica Minolta South Africa, is the fourth South African to receive the highest certification of Konica Minolta Business Technologies’ professional education, the Diploma in Color, joining the expert rank of a total of only seven Asia Pacific achievers of this qualification.
The sought-after qualification has been described as second to none in its design and scope in the entire printing market. It provides its receivers with the competencies to meet the digital world’s demand for reliable services and expert consultancy in standardised results and colour output.
More than 100 online exams have to be taken to reach certification level, such as Outward Associate, Professional, Expert Colour, Master of Colour and an additional Expert level. Once these exams are completed, the candidate is invited to Japan for the practical three-day exam. To the future applicants of the Color Diploma, Docrat has these encouraging words: Study well, be prepared and know everything from the DTP applications to the Fiery Controller.
Docrat, a production supervisor with five years experience in desktop publishing, is also the first branch technician to qualify and says that studying towards the diploma has changed both his view of- and previous experience of working with colour.
I have gained a great deal of knowledge and expert skills during my time preparing for the diploma. The result is that customers will benefit from highly consistent print quality and clearly defined quality standards through sophisticated colour manipulation. In addition, issues that would ordinarily have taken me a few days to troubleshoot can now be resolved in just a few minutes, allowing customers’ downtime to be at a minimum, thus not affecting their workload output, said Docrat.
The qualification has already helped me through some tricky colour situations. I have also been able to transfer some of the knowledge gained to the customer by showing them the correct workflows within their environments, allowing them to achieve their correct outputs more quickly and efficiently.
We are immensely proud of Yunus and now with four Diploma in Colour recipients on board, South Africa is taking the lead in the colour expert rankings in the Asia Pacific region. Our clients embracing digital colour printing can thus be confident that they are dealing with the leaders in colour technology, said Alan Griffith, Konica Minolta South Africa MD.
