Acquia Certified Developer exam - passed!

But what is it all about?

Acquia has launched their certificate program in 2014 for everyone to validate their skills and knowledge about Drupal. If you have experience with Drupal, no matter if you work at a company or as a freelancer, you can take the exam. Candidates earn a credential by succeeding.

How did our colleagues do?

After getting back from the exam, we asked our team members to summarize their experiences. They all mentioned that they prepared for the exam by reading many reviews of the assessment (e.g. by Angie ‘Webchick’ Byron). Everyone agreed that a strong English understanding is a must, as most of the questions are pretty complex and long, but they didn’t have trouble with the time. The biggest surprise for them was that even they are all primarily backend developers, they did better in frontend-related topics!

Attila highlighted that at first he overthought some of the questions, and then realized there was no need for that at all, so then he just took it easy, and in most cases the best answer was the standard or most optimal one.

Andor mentioned that visually he had some concerns as sometimes it was hard to find his way around in the answer-options, he would have enjoyed to see some syntax highlight in the code.

Mau said that she found the exam very practice-specific to measure if the candidate has enough experience with Drupal or if they met many Drupal-related problems yet, so there was no need to be familiar with theories or function definitions. However there are questions which are pretty specific, so if you haven’t met the problem before, you probably would find it hard to solve it.

So what is our plan?

We would like at least 50% of our developers to be Acquia certified until the end of the first quarter of 2015.

And why did we do it?

Since most of the time we work as consultants or subcontractors for other Drupal shops and agencies, our developers have to participate in technical interviews at the beginning of almost every new cooperation. Our goal with these certifications is to remove this assessment from the process, and we hope Acquia’s certificate will soon become a standard in the industry.