Community 3/7/2018

Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer - About the Exam

On March 1st 2018, the new Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer exam became available. As it's now possible to take the exam online, I booked it for the same day and passed it with a bit of luck. Here, I am telling you about my experience with the exam.

Which is the target group of the Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer exam?

The certifcation is supposed to prove that the certified person has sufficient experience with developing Magento 2. It is officially aimed at developers having about 1.5 years of experience with the development of Magento 2 projects. In my opinion, passing this exam qualifies to call you a "Senior Magento 2 Developer".

To pass the exam, you need to have alround knowledge of Magento: Frontend, Backend, and APIs. It covers everything which has to do with PHP and XML in Magento 2. You won't need knowledge of JavaScript.

Fortunately, you only need 64% (unconfirmed number) of the points to pass, so specialists who don't usually cover all of these topics in their day to day job have a good chance of passing the exam if they have sufficient Magento 2 knowledge in other fields.

What are the contents of the exam?

It's impossible to list all fields here. Let me try to list the most important areas:
  • EAV
  • Dependency Injection
  • Module dependencies
  • Plugins
  • Events
  • XML Arguments
  • Extension Attributes
  • Repositories
  • UI Components in the Adminhtml area
  • REST API
  • Frontend Layout and Blocks
Of course, this list is not complete, it just reflects my memories.

Does Magento 1 experience help with the exam?

Yes, it does, but not too much. Too many things have changed between Magento 1 and Magento 2. There have been perhaps 2 or 3 questions where my Magento 1 knowledge helped me guessing the right answer.

Do I need knowledge of Magento Commerce (Magento 2 Enterprise Edition)?

No, you don't need to be experienced in the Magento Commerce Edition. Development basics are the same in all editions, and special module knowledge is not necessary.

What is the best way to prepare for the exam?

The following resources can help you preparing the exam:
  • the official study guide
  • a training can help with the certification as well. For example, individual trainings can be held with a focus on the certification.
To be honest, I don't think that the study guide helps a lot with the exam. It mostly consists of high-level questions, while the exam is about the implementation itself. The sample questions do help in order to get a good impression of the types of questions in the exam though.

If I'd have to take the exam again, I would personally do some sample implementations of tasks I am not too familiar with. This can be:

  • Implement a REST API endpoint with authorization
  • Add an extension attribute for products and / or customer addresses
  • Create an adminhtml grid and/or and form
  • Use the getList implementation of repositories (i.e. the product repository) for getting a sorted and filtered list of entities

How much experience is necessary to pass?

You will need at least one year of full-time development experience to have a chance to pass the exam in my opinion. The more, the better, as Magento 2 is a huge platform - you will discover new parts of it constantly. If you avoided some parts in the past (like I mostly did with adminhtml forms and grids), you should catch up with those before taking the exam. You can leave some smaller gaps, but it helps a lot to have at least some high-level overview of all the mentioned parts. Personally, giving Magento 2 development trainings helped because that forced me to dive into many parts of the platform.

How does the exam compare to the Magento (1) Certified Developer Exam?

The Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer certification needs more experience. While I know people who passed the Magento 1 Developer certification with only half a year of development experience, this will hardly be possible with the new exam. Also, the questions require more understanding, and it's not so important any more to remember the exact syntax of some XML or PHP method names (with a few exceptions).

How can I become certified?

Since March 2018 the certification exam is officially available. Three steps are necessary if you want to take the exam on-site at a certification center:
  1. Buy a voucher at Magento U. A voucher is at about 260 $.
  2. Reserve a date at a certification center at https://account.magento.com/certification. There are at least a couple certification centers in the major countries. You'll need the voucher which you acquired before for that.
  3. Take the exam at the selected certification center. You'll hear about when you should be there and what you should bring in good time. The exam itself takes place at a PC in the certification center. It includes 60 questions in 90 minutes.
You'll get to know the result directly after the exam.

If you'd like to try the Online Certification, read my blog post which contains a stop-by-step guide.