Passing Magento Developer Plus certification
Over an year ago, I started working on the Magento platform. In last year’s spring, a colleague from Optaros took the Magento Developer Plus certification exam. Since then, I began to like the idea of taking the certification exam, more as a motivation to learn the ins and outs of Magento.
Few months ago I was enrolled into a company study group for the certification. This was the first time I was sponsored for a certification (yes, until now everything was with my money). Preparing in a study group was a whole different experience.
Those who have more experience in a field balance the situation for the others and can give better examples from their own experience. It’s easier to understand from concrete examples then to try to imagine the scenarios yourself.
The certification is available through Prometric. So when you decide that you’re ready you can go to the website to purchase the voucher and schedule the exam.
The price for a voucher is 260$, not exactly cheap, but if you get to convince your boss to pay, it probably won’t be so bad. 🙂
But let’s get to the more interesting subject, the preparation.
Materials
Magento is not doing very good on this subject, there are very few materials and they are not centralized.
My sources were:
– Magento® Certified Developer Plus Exam Study Guide – it is compulsive to read the guide and try to find answers to all the questions in it;
– Magento training – especially Fundamentals of Magento Development
– blogs – I don’t want to give any names, there are a lot of people that write about the problems that they encounter and blog about the exam.
Unfortunately there isn’t a way like for PHP, ZF and Symfony where you can find all you need in one place, basically it depends on your luck and searching skills, there isn’t an “official version”. Things become weird when you find different approaches that are version specific.
How did I prepare
I began with the video training. It’s not perfect by it’s very helpful. I think the problem with most certifications is that you don’t get to work with all the available modules, just like in PHP you don’t get to work that much with sockets and streams.
Even though you don’t get the code and sometimes it is hard to follow and transcribe the examples, I think that the video tutorials are one of the most important sources at the moment.
Secondly, with the Study Guide in my hand, I began to try to answer the questions from it. When I joined the Study Group, the work divided between all the members in the group. My advantage was that it was the second generation of the group and we could profit from the documentation already developed by the first group.
If you’re preparing by yourself, I think the most important thing is to start, that’s the hardest part. And if you don’t know where to start, Google search the Magento questions, there are already a lot of people that are posting the explanations.
Answers for the questions from the first chapters are the easiest to find. As the number of the chapter is getting bigger, the number of Google results decreases.
But after the first questions, you should understand what is all about and in theory you will no longer need the documentation.
Use Mage::log(Varien_Debug::backtrace(true, false)); for stack trace and xdebug (http://xdebug.org/) to see what’s going on behind the scene. With patience, all the questions find their answers.
Because it was a group, the study was easier for me, but even so, to be sure of the explanation I has to dive deep in the code.
The exam
Some of the questions are difficult, but there are also accessible ones. The questions in the exam are off all levels of difficulty.
For Plus, the exam takes 2h not 2.5h as it is specified in the guide.
If you opted for Plus, there are 11 questions from Enterprise and advanced difficulty questions, of which 7 correct ones are required to pass. Basically this is the difficulty difference. For this questions it matters how much Enterprise experience you have.
In the guide for each exam, the questions are broken in percentages for each chapter.
Because in the non Plus certification there are no Enterprise questions, you only have to answer the necessary percentage from the full exam in order to pass and it’s not required to have a certain percentage from a certain chapter.
Things that are done regularly are analyzed in detail, it is important to understand how each function that is approached in each chapter works and what is the purpose of all those tags in the xml files.
Usually there are things you work with, or at least with which there is a good probability you have been working from the modules listed in the guide.
Post exam
Before you leave the room you’ll know if you’ve passed or not. When you exit the room you’ll receive a printed paper with the correct number of questions from each section from the total number .
In case you haven’t been successful you’ll receive by mail from Magento a voucher with a discount for a future attempt. They state that you should study at least 3 more weeks before you try again. Anyway, after you’ve taken the exam you’ll have a better view over your overall knowledge for a future attempt.
After few days (3 in my case) you will be able to see your profile on the Magento website as a reference.
The diploma got to Romania in about a month, the delivery address is the one from the Magento website account.
Best of luck!