Browsing articles in "Magento Certification"
Oct 21, 2019
kalpesh

How to pass Magento 2 certification exams

Hi folks, I am getting many requests on how to pass M2 certifications via email, twitter, slack, skype, etc.. I recently passed 5th M2 certification exam and would like to share with all my Magento friends how I prepared for these exams. There is no secret mantra which can help you pass M2 certification tests quickly and easily.

You need hands-on experience, that is the first mandatory requirement. At least an year of experience in Magento 2 will give you good understanding on how everything in it works. If you are the kind of folks who copy and paste the code all the time, you need at least 3 years of Magento 2 experience.

Second in the list is, Magento DevDocs. No matter what M2 exam you go for, read and understand all the Magento DevDocs articles on it. Being part of the hardest M2 certification test questions writer group, I can assure you, you will not be disappointed if you have prepared DevDocs for your certification exam.

Thirdly, go prepare SwiftOtter study guides. And prepare it slowly, understand each and every line written in that guide. After completing that, give the SwiftOtter test to know where you stand with your preparation and if you will able to crack the real exam.

Last but not the least, try things practically. Though I understand you might not have luxury of time to test and learn everything practically, try important areas of the exam by writing the code locally and understand the flow of logic.

I may edit this post in the future, but if you have followed these three important things mentioned above, your chances to pass any M2 exam will increase exponentially.

Oct 20, 2018
kalpesh

Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer Plus Workshop

Last month I and Jonathan from Corra participated in the M2 Developer Plus certification workshop which happened in London. The goal of this new certification is to test the developers’ skills in Magento 2 Commerce and Open Source. This exam is intended to be difficult than the Professional Developer that was launched earlier this year. The exam will be scenario-based, so don’t come memorizing class and method names to the exam, it will not help ๐Ÿ™‚

Participants

Developers from Magento, an Adobe Company and few SIs participated in this workshop to come up with the questions for this exam. Everybody was highly skilled in Magento 2, and submitted very good questions which will make it difficult for the developers to pass this exam ๐Ÿ™‚ Partners who participated – Corra (I an Jonathan Lorenzi), Something Digital (Max Chadwick), DCKAP (Jaykanth), Vaimo (Sergii) and Cream NL (Julian).ย  And there were Alex Paliarush and Iryna from Magento. Vitaliy Golomoziy and Vinai Kopp were top of the game, submitting and reviewing some crazy amount of questions respectively. It was great to work with all these awesome folks for four days. This was all possible under the guidance of Peter Manijak,ย Director of Certification & Special Programs at Magento U.

New topics

This exam added two new topics that are different than Professional exam. First one is of course Magento 2 Commerce features. The other one, which I personally advocated for few years to include in different areas of the Magento ecosystem, is Magento Security.

Magento Security

I proposed this topic to Peter Manijak few weeks before the workshop, he really liked the idea and gave his support to include this in the certification. We were not sure whether to add objectives in other topics or to create an entire new topic for this. Peter took this to the team and we agreed to keep it as it’s own topic. We also got support on this topic from Richard Huie-Buckius, Head of Training & Certification Services at Magento, an Adobe Company. I am very grateful to Peter and Richard for understanding the importance of Security in Magento and making it a part of the certification. Peter is personally a big fan of Security so huge props to him on including this additional topic to the exam.

The goal to introduce Magento Security in the exam is to test developers’ abilities in security area when they develop something in Magento. Security is a part of development, every developer who works on Magento needs to know at least the basics of security to write secure code while developing extensions or custom in-house modules. The exam will test the developers on frontend, backend and overall architectural related security questions. For full details, wait for the study guide ๐Ÿ™‚

Launch date

The certification will be available to the developers in November 2018 (as per the tweet from Magento U handle).

Thanks

It was a great opportunity for me to participate in this workshop. I learned a lot from all the participants and am thankful to Peter Manijak and Corra for allowing me to participate in the workshop!

Aug 13, 2018
kalpesh

Magento 2 Certified Professional Developer Exam Experience

M2 Certified Professional Developer test is here for a while now and I finally got some time to prepare and appear for this test. It asks you 60 questions which you have to answer in a time limit of 90 minutes. So basically you get 1.5 minutes to answer each question. Though you should not waste time if you are able to answer the question quicker, as there are many questions in the test which are lengthy and requires more time to understand the question. If you are a non-native English speaker, you may have to read some of the questions 2-3 times before fully understanding what it is exactly asking. Passing score is 64% – so you need to get 39 correct answers out of 60, which is almost 2 out of 3 questions. At the end of the test, you get the score on screen which is great to know instantly if you passed or you need to re-take the test.

Yesterday I took the M2 Professional Developer test and passed it. I found it difficult to be honest, questions were lengthy and answers were confusing. Magento recommends developers to at least have 1.5 to 2 years of experience before taking this test to pass, but I think you can still go for the test if you have worked on 4-5 Magento 2 projects hands on with around a year of experience. I believe that is enough if you are fully into Magento and understand the architecture of the system and technical concepts of various features it offers.

I found SwiftOtter very useful, along with it’s practice test where it offers 44 questions https://swiftotter.com/technical/certifications/magento-2-certified-developer-practice-test. However, it’s not guaranteed that you will pass solely by studying their guide and practice test. You also need to understand the code and should have experience working on it in the M2 projects to clear the exam. I suggest taking the practice test once you have read and understood the topics in the guide and Magento DevDocs and are ready to face the real test.

It’s evident there’s a lot of hard work done by the Magento U team and developers who contributed to this test by writing questions and answers. It’s really hard to pass this test if you don’t have deep understanding in Magento 2 concepts and don’t have enough practical knowledge to prove your M2 abilities.

I think this test could have done even better if it had also focused on:

Security – Not a single question was asked on this topic. I am not talking about Payment, PCI and Magento Vault things when I say Security, I mean writing code that does not leave behind security vulnerabilities. It should be must for a backend or full-stack developer to at least have a basic understanding of how to write secure code, Magento had a great opportunity to include some good security questions (like CSRF token, escaping user-submitted data, XSS prevention, preventing file path exploits, sanitizing user data before saving/getting from db, etc..) here, but….

Readability – Most of the Magento developers are from non-native English speaking countries, myself included. I feel there were few lengthy questions which were just difficult to understand for non-native speakers. I also heard similar complaints from few developers who took this test confirming that they had to read some of the questions 2-3 times which took much of their time to just understand what the questions were trying to ask. That’s a disadvantage to many developers and I believe Magento U will take a note of that when writing upcoming new test questions.

Let me know your thoughts! Kudos to Magento U team for creating such an outstanding test.

Jan 4, 2013
kalpesh

Magento Certification Preparation / Interview Questions Answers

Hi guys, here is the stuff I collected and created from myriad number of websites/blogs/forums/ magento source codebase during my Magento certification preparation. I have put all the things I found and studied during my preparation in one place, so that other developers who are preparing for the exam can benefit from it.

Credits to all who have contributed these things over the web from where I copied for study purpose. Few credits to me as well as I also have contributed many things in it ๐Ÿ™‚ This may contain errors and wrong information and I don’t guarantee it to be completely correct. But this should be a good resource if you want a heads up! Please be aware that you need to go through the study guide and fundamental videos yourself in order to pass this exam.

If you are here to prepare for Interview, then I would recommend you to also go through these links:
Magento Interview questions and answers
Magento Advanced Interview questions/

The below stuff alone will definitely not going to help you much in passing the exam. Not to mention, these resource can also be used for Magento interview preparation.

Continue reading »

Dec 27, 2012
kalpesh

Magento Certified Developer Exam

Yesterday I gave my Magento Certified Developer exam and passed with a decent score. After sharing my score and success in the exam, most of my friends asked me how to prepare for this exam. So, here I share with you guys what I studied/prepared for this exam.

For passing or getting good score in this exam, you must have very decent experience in Magento. Good amount of projects with both frontend and backend hands-on is highly recommended before taking this test.

I prepared for 2 months, along with my work. Thanks to my wife who allowed me to study for the exam without disturbing or complaining ๐Ÿ™‚ In the last 15 days before my test, I thank my Boss who allowed me to also prepare for the exam in the work hours.

First of all, I went through the videos available Free (On-Demand, 40 Hours, Fundamentals of Magento) on Magento website. You can even purchase more videos if you are interested.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/training/on-demand

Then, most of the time I spent on Study Guide PDF. It’s very important because for each question it asks you, you have to dig the Magento source code to find the answer. That also helps you in improving your understanding of Magento architecture.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/certification/ (under Resources Tab)

Once you think that you are now prepared with all the items listed in the Study Guide PDF, you can cross-check it with the Magento Self-Assessment Checklist PDF.
https://www.magentocommerce.com/services/certification

Go through all the articles by Alan Storm in the Knowledge Base section of Magentocommerce website. (Actually, that is the first step I took when starting my Magento career)
Magestore.com has an dedicated blog category for Certification, go through all the topics:
http://blog.magestore.com/category/magento-tutorials/magento-certificate-material/

(If you still have time, I would recommend you to go through the stack overflow answers, related to Magento, given by Alan Storm, Vinai Kopp, …)
http://stackoverflow.com/users/485589/vinai
http://stackoverflow.com/users/4668/alan-storm
http://stackoverflow.com/users/465971/ivan-chepurnyi
Stack Overflow top Magento answerers
You can find many more Magento gurus on StackOverflow.

Considering you have completed all the above mentioned preparation guides, there is no way you can fail in Magento Certified Developer exam!

Best luck.

Welcome to my Blog

Kalpesh MehtaHelping Magento developers in their day-to-day development problems since 2011. Most of the problems and solutions here are my own experiences while working on different projects. Enjoy the blog and don't forget to throw comments and likes/+1's/tweets on posts you like. Thanks for visiting!

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