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Thoughts on taking the Acquia Drupal certification exam

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Earlier this week I had the opportunity to be the first developer at Code Drop to sit an exam to become an "Acquia Certified Developer". I managed to clear the exam with the following results:

  • Section 1 - Fundamental Web Development Concepts: 87%
  • Section 2 - Site Building: 87%
  • Section 3 - Front end development (Theming) : 92%
  • Section 4 - Back end development (Coding) : 81%

Like many others who have done the exam, I will briefly run over my experience and thoughts on the whole process.

Setup & Software

The testing software provided by Kryterion had some serious rough edges and inconsistencies. All in all, I probably spent 20 minutes chatting to support to try and iron out issues with my account and to clarify inconsistencies with their instructions. Amongst the issues were:

  • Total meltdown of my computer after unplugging my external monitors to center the camera on my face during the Biometric Profile.
  • No clear status indicating if the Biometric profile was successful after my computer restarted.
  • General confusion as to why the character "?" was not included as one of the “special characters” required to make up passwords (a trivial point I'll admit).
  • Inconsistent information about what kind of camera and environment is required for the examination.
  • Inconsistent information about software and hardware requirements, specifically around requiring several network ports to be open?
  • The software simply shutting off completely twice during the exam with no feedback as to why (I now suspect it was due to my internet connection dropping momentarily and I was able to resume the test where I left off by relaunching from the online portal).
  • A general lack of polish when being guided through the setup and purchasing of the examination.

All of those quarms aside, once things were churning along, the software did allow me to select answers to questions and it did spit out a score at the end. Ironically, if you excluded all of the faux security around cheating, Drupal would have been an ideal platform for the e-commerce and testing features.

Getting prepared

I read over the Get Ready guide provided by Acquia a few hours before taking the exam.

  • Some of the documentation linked to was for Drupal 6, which did throw me initially. There wasn’t anything that stuck out to me as being D6 specific in the exam.
  • Skimming some of the documentation I was less familiar with was very valuable, especially when I knew I leaned on documentation and my IDE for certain things frequently.
  • A lot of the material linked didn’t come up in any form in the exam, but I imagine my 60 questions were selected randomly from a pool.
  • The relevant training videos from Drupalize.me was a nice touch. Code Drop are an avid subscriber to the website already!

I think in a lot of cases, the questions did heavily lend themselves to someone who had been getting their hands dirty with Drupal as opposed to someone who had memorised the documentation (which is a great sign in my opionion).

Evaluating the test

My thoughts on the usefulness of the test probably echo those of others who have written about it:

Certification isn’t meant to be used as a stand alone method of evaluating candidates.
Heather James

There are many other aspects to recruitment for which certification does not provide a substitute; it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Dries Buytaert

As the above quotes concisely sum up, I would be hesitant to say scoring a passing grade of 65% would be an automatic qualifier for any Drupal development role, but I think passing the exam and spending the time and money to take the exam are good qualifiers for developers who are invested in Drupal. Being invested in Drupal along with skills and experience are all part of the DNA of an excellent developer.

At Code Drop, the following factors come into play when we are looking for Drupal developers:

  • Involvement in the Drupal community (contrib, core, support, conferences, stack exchange, whatever).
  • A hands on interview with coding challenges (we have kicked around the idea of formalising these challenges into an interactive Drupal module which verifies the list of challenges have been completed).
  • The desire to continue to learn and improve their Drupal skills over time.

I imagine most Drupal agencies have some similar set of rules for evaluating candidates. 

Summing up

I would highly recommend taking the certification exam if you are a Drupal developer. If you want to be prequalified as someone who has worked with Drupal before and is interested in the platform, it's a no-brainer.

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