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I once read “Certifications are a useful indicator only when people don't know how to look for other indicators.” It’s great for recruiters to see, for future employers who not be completely familiar with Drupal, or developers new to Drupal and don’t have the strong presence or portfolio. However for the thousands of established developers, some may see it as an addition to their portfolio while others may see it as a waste of time and money, but at $250, it’s probably worth an attempt.

Since Acquia launched the exam one question I’ve been seeing a lot is: “Does Drupal need a certification program?”. Let’s break this down. If you’re looking to hire a Drupal Developer what traits do you seek? Active in the Drupal forums? Maintains a module or theme? Contributes to a module or theme? Submits patches? A strong portfolio? Does a certification add to or take away from that person? Of course this all assumes the person doing the hiring has some knowledge of Drupal. If the hiring manager doesn’t know much about Drupal, or has no idea who Dries Buytaert is, then holding this certification might be useful to show that you have some knowledge of the complex beast that is Drupal.

Drupal positions vary from a Site Administrator, to a Developer, to a Themer with different definitions depending on who you ask. Acquia’s certification is currently a “catch all”, with some track options down the pipeline that will allow one to test for Front or Backend, which under my definitions would translate to Themer and Developer. Currently the exam is setup in 4 sections:

1. Fundamental Web Concepts 10-13%

2. Site Building 27-30%

3. Front End Development (Theming) 25-27%

4. Back End Development (Coding) 30-35%

(currently the Acquia site and guide have conflicting percentiles, so I’ve included both as a range)

If you’re great at memorizing facts, that won’t help you here. You’ll be given real Drupal scenarios and asked (in most cases) to pick the best solution. Acquia gives a good look at each section on their site (https://www.acquia.com/products-services/drupal-training/acquia-certifie...), but essentially section 1 covers HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, basic PHP concepts, and Git. Section 2 is configuring content types, taxonomies, views, etc. Section 3 is basic theming concepts including functions to override the output and Section 4 deals with the Drupal API, coding standards, and analyzing custom code.

You have 90 minutes to take the exam which consists of 60 questions. A nice perk is there is a way to flag questions you may not know, so you can move on. In general it’s a good idea to flag anything you cannot answer in 15-20 seconds, to ensure you at least get a good look at all questions in the exam. Start by answering everything you definitely know, then jump on the questions where you can narrow it down by at least 2, and finally the ones where you’re clearly guessing - Don’t fear, we all will have questions that are a crap shoot. These ones, if time permits, try to weed out at least one answer before making the guess.

Now being a bit more heavy backend coding wise, themer’s or site admin’s may have a more difficult time with section 4, which makes sense why they are moving to a track system. With many moving parts with Drupal, while one may specialize in a certain area it’s good to have an understanding of the other pieces. Drupal has some amazing documentation, along with tutorials for backend coding and the API, so while it is the largest section of the exam, it probably the largest amount of information as well.

So onto the big question - Do you need to get this certification? If you have a fabulous Drupal portfolio with many public facing sites, maintain or contribute to modules/themes and are active within the Drupal community, then probably not. If you’ve mainly worked on intranet or private sector sites, even though you may have years of experience, you may not have much to show future employers. In this instance it’s a good way to show that you have a well rounded knowledge of this complex CMS. In general though, with the way the exam sits today, assuming one scores pretty well it would also show that you are essentially a full stack developer, which is never a bad thing.

Acquia recently put out a free ebook to help individuals prepare for the exam (https://www.acquia.com/resources/ebooks/five-steps-get-ready-acquia-cert...), and it contains most of the same links Drupal’s webchick (Angie Byron) posted on her write-up: http://webchick.net/node/125 Either way, unless you’re a very confident full stack developer you’ll want to study. Keep in mind this is not an exam you can “cram” for, you need to put in hours prepping. To increase your knowledge of section 4, build a custom module. Build a custom module with a simple database, then build a new release that requires a change to the database schema. Section 3? Build a custom theme complete with custom functions and template files. Building any sort of dev website will help with section 2.