Best Adobe Acrobat Classes Online

Adobe Acrobat is one of the most ubiquitous tools utilized in office and white-color professional settings, owing to its ease of use and general versatility. It has become the industry-standard tool for creating and managing PDF documents, and it is used in almost all professional contexts related to documentation, recordkeeping, editing, and office management. If you are working in a professional context where you need to collect, organize, or share documents, it is likely that you will want to learn how to use Acrobat.

Like many professional office tools, learning Acrobat will need to be part of a larger set of developmental and professional skills, since there aren’t a lot of jobs (if any) that only require Acrobat training. This means that you are likely to need additional training in a range of different skills if you are looking for a job as an office professional.

Common Job Roles for Adobe Acrobat Professionals

• Desktop Publisher: Desktop publishers are responsible for the technical aspects of taking graphic design assets, books, manuscripts, flyers, or essentially any published piece of media and translating it into a finalized product that can be sent off for publication. They will need to understand how Acrobat works as a publishing tool, and they will need to know how to create and edit finalized PDFs that they can then approve for publication.
• Publications Specialist: Likewise, publication specialists deal with the finalization and publication of documents across a range of different fields. They are responsible for ensuring that the finalized product is accurate to their client's wishes and that all of the necessary steps prior to the publication process have been handled. They will use applications like Adobe Acrobat to create and edit PDFs that will serve as the final digital proof of a document before it enters the physical publication process.
• Document Control Specialist: Document control specialists maintain and organize important documents and ensure that all sensitive documentation is accessible and compliant with relevant laws and regulations. They often work in fields like law or healthcare, where important record keeping is a regular part of the job and all records need to be checked in detailed ways to ensure that they are accurate and compliant. Acrobat is one of the most commonly used tools for creating and storing these documents, since it helps make the digitization process significantly easier.
• PDF Accessibility Specialist: Similarly, PDF Accessibility specialists are tasked with ensuring that any document or PDF that a company or institution creates complies with all required accessibility standards, in terms of ease of access and ADA regulations. They will be responsible for editing the documents and being up-to-date on best practices and accessibility requirements for their specific field. They will also be responsible for knowing how to create and modify relevant documents so that they work with screen readers and other assistive devices.
• Administrative Assistants and Office Managers: These professionals oversee the regular workflow and operations of an office setting. The specific job responsibilities will vary from field to field (for example, working as an administrative assistant in a law office will differ significantly from working as an office manager at a meat packing plant), but these professionals will need to be able to work with tools like Acrobat to create and share PDFs and other relevant documents with either employees or other invested stakeholders.
• Graphic Designers: Graphic Designers, particularly those working as freelancers, are likely to need to learn how to work with Acrobat so that they can create PDF versions of their work to easily share and publish. They won’t need to focus on learning Acrobat as much as they will need other Adobe tools, but because they are likely to work with the Adobe Creative Cloud, Acrobat integration makes a lot of sense as a skill to pick up.

Significant Fields Hiring Adobe Acrobat Professionals

Any industry that deals with a sufficient amount of paperwork, documentation, or records is likely to need to hire some specialists who understand and can utilize Adobe Acrobat. A few of the most significant of these industries include:

• Business: Businesses require significant infrastructure to operate, and a large part of this involves the generation of paperwork and other important documentation. It is also important that usable and simple form documents are created to help ease the process of interfacing with customers and clients. Finally, businesses are likely to utilize Acrobat for publishing traditional media advertising campaigns and other graphic design projects, especially if they are working with a larger publication house.
• Administration: Administrative roles are a part of any large institution, be it a university, a government agency, or even a large business handling its non-business tasks. Administrators need to keep significant and important records of almost all transactions and interactions with important clients or stakeholders, and they need to understand how to modify and store these records. These are all reasons that they regularly utilize Adobe Acrobat to create and fill out important documents.
• Legal: The legal sector produces a staggering amount of paperwork and documentation, almost all of which needs to be easily accessible by multiple parties and needs to be compliant with a range of different, specific statutes. Paralegals and clerks will need to understand how to organize and document this paperwork, and administrative assistants will need to be able to communicate how to fill it out with non-professionals engaging with the system, all of which are key functionalities of Adobe Acrobat.
• Healthcare: Likewise, the healthcare industry produces more paperwork than virtually any other professional field. Thus, there is a massive system of administrators, record keepers, data specialists, compliance officers, and other professionals who make sure that these records are stored in ways that are accessible to relevant parties but still protected when and if they contain sensitive data. Acrobat is used for creating and filling out this paperwork and for ensuring that it is only modified or filled out by authorized personnel. 
• Publishing: Whether you are discussing books, magazines, business cards, flyers or even digital art pieces, the publication industry relies heavily on PDFs to edit and finalize work in advance of its release. Professionals in this industry will need to understand how to work with, share, edit, and publish PDFs as part of the finalization process before the digital document enters production to become a physical work.