Archive for October 19th, 2009

Observant readers will have noticed the recent addition of the Zend Certification logo to the top of my page. This is because, somewhat predictably, I have recently passed my Zend PHP5 Certification exam and can now be found as a certified engineer on the Zend Yellow Pages. This is good news for HigherSites as it takes our total of PHP5 Zend Certified Engineers (ZCE) to 3, and I believe this makes us unique within the UK, as I see no other company on the Yellow Pages with that many certified engineers.

So what is the certification, and why might you want to obtain it?

Well, Zend is basically the leading commercial voice behind the PHP scripting language, and the only company offering an official certification for PHP developers. The vast majority of PHP developers will never obtain certification, so having it not only lends weight to one’s claim of PHP expertise, it also lends an air of exclusivity and uniqueness to those that do obtain it. Will it make you a better developer? Possibly, but not necessarily. If nothing else, working through the various available revision materials serves as an excellent aide memoire and helps re-inforce language constructs and peculiarites in the mind.

The exam focuses on general PHP, the differences between PHP4 and PHP5, object orientating programming, XML, security, streams, arrays and functions. Whilst some of the questions are really rather simple for experienced developers, there are plenty of questions to trip you up. I have been writing PHP for a decade and there was still plenty for me to learn in order to get the pass mark. As developers, we tend to focus on specific application types (i.e. content management, e-commerce etc.) and so there are many areas of the language that we probably never use. The exam tries to cover many varied aspects of the language and so will inevitably require study and revision time on the part of the developer hoping to attain certification.

One thing I have found in my 13 or so years in the IT industry, is that probably more than 90% of the people you meet don’t actually really know what they’re doing. The really talented developers and IT professionals are much thinner on the ground than you might imagine. It may come as no surprise then that, as at time of writing, only 222 professionals in the UK have gained ZCE status for PHP5.

I posted a Twitter update when I passed, but as so few people know what “ZCE” actually means, I have been fielding questions since. One pal refered to it as a “Mickey Mouse Qualification”, which frankly irritated me. For me, getting Zend Certified is the culmination of many hours of research, study and revision that has built upon 10 years of very hard work. It annoys me that whilst there are many academic and professional course for closed source platforms like .NET, there is very little available for much larger open source platforms such as PHP. This means that your average PHP developer is almost entirely self-taught, and that in my mind deserves much greater respect and shows a problem solving personality that is exactly what you want to see in a programmer. Certainly, in my experience as an employer, and despite PHP being more popular than say .NET, there are fewer decent PHP developers on the job market as there are .NET programmers. Good PHP developers are always in high demand, and achieving ZCE certainly isn’t going to hinder your chances of gainful employment!

I’m proud of my achievement and rightly so.