I qualified as a ZCE yesterday. I guess the only tangible benefits of this is I get to write the letters on my CV / business cards and use this nifty logo, but I found the overall process of the certification pretty worthwhile.
The thing that's put me off certification in the past is the imagined cost, in terms of both time and money. I thought there'd be a dreary course covering things I already knew, and I'd be paying a premium for the privilege. In fact, I was completely wrong!
Once I looked into it, I found that although Zend offer a grueling 18-hour course for about £800 it's not a requirement for the certification itself, you can buy an exam voucher for about £100 and just turn up and take the test, so I did.
Well... OK, not quite. For a start, I didn't pay for it - work kindly agreed to. Secondly, I wanted a bit of an idea of what the exam was like, so my first step was to buy a set of 5 practice exams for just over a tenner and have a go at one of them.
Also, to get an idea of what subjects would be covered, I also bought the study guide published by php|architect. I'm not sure how much I'd recommend this book. For a start, it doesn't cover everything the exam will but does have a few gems of wisdom in it, so it's worth picking up if you find it cheaply.
Thankfully I passed the first practice exam, and got a nice breakdown of which subject areas I'd done well in and which I'd done badly. With that as a basis, I knew which areas I was weak on and could try and study up (I also knew that finally committing some of the array and string functions to memory would do me good).
In the end I did much less revision than I'd expected and on the day was a bit nervous, but the whole thing was an anticlimax. It took place in the meeting room of a smallish office using a smallish Dell laptop, and took much less time than I'd expected. After I'd finished early and checked all my answers I got bored and clicked 'end exam' and a little pop-up told me I'd passed - no fanfare, no fireworks, no ticker-tape parade? I was given a small laser-printed sheet of paper to prove I'd passed.
And the value of the exam? Well, next time I'm recruiting and see ZCE on a CV I'll know that the applicant has a strong grasp of the most important areas of PHP. Also, studying for the exam did teach me about a lot of the 'nitty gritty' areas of PHP I'd not paid much attention to before.
There was another reward too, and that was reassurance that I'm ok at my job. That may sound silly but aside from a brief 2-year period, I've spent my career at the top of the pile in small teams. When you don't have senior people around to measure yourself against you have no way of knowing how well you're doing. Having a bar like the ZCE to aim for, even if it's a relatively low one, let me reassure myself that I'm not too far behind.
So what next? Zend are supposedly going to be doing a Zend Framework certification at some point, so I'll be keeping an eye on that quite closely. There's no 'Advanced ZCE' to aim for so maybe I'll take a look at the various MySQL certifications and see how I can do on that side of things.
And of course, I'll report back in future if it turns out that the ZCE actually helps my career in any tangible way!