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Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2007 10:47 am
by RobertGonzalez
xylex wrote:I got my certification last month after starting to see job listings specifically asking for it. I did a few of the practice tests online to prep for it, and I found that I could recieve a "passing" grade after correctly answering about half of the questions. These tests both are produced by Zend, and they adverstise that the online test closely matches to how the real test would be scored.

Now I understand that there should be some leniency for how obscure some of the information on the test is, but 50%??? This means that I could recieve my PHP5 certification while failing the entire OOP syntax, the PHP4 to PHP 5 differences, and the security sections of the test.

What's much more difficult than finding someone who has their certification is finding someone who failed the test. Zend says that there's an 80% pass rate, far higher than certification exams of competetive languages. Honestly, the whole experience of how easy it was to pass the test just cheapened the certification to me. I think that Zend made the test very easy to pass as an effort to gain market share with employers and establish name recognition, rather than something that lets the true professional developers stand out.
I was reading somewhere (I think it was Amazon.com's user comments for the certification training books) that there were people that had known no PHP that got the study guides, read them through two nights before and got their certification even though they had never coded in PHP. That is a little sad.

Hopefully though, when using your 'clout' as a ZCE, you can back it up with visible applications and solid code bases, so the ZCE status becomes a 'glad you have it' more than a 'you must have it' type thing.

Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 7:27 am
by m3mn0n
timvw wrote:Read: It all depends on your perception of Zend
I'd argue it depends on a particular employers perception of Zend. And since you can't know for sure how much weight they put into certification, I'd always advise gettng it because it can't hurt to have. Plus it's not really much of a fee.

The time you put into studying and paying for certification could pay off quite well, and the worst case scenario is you have another notch on your belt for bragging. ;)