I didn’t have many questions where I felt I’d need the manual for parameter order, but that’s the nature of randomized questions – we didn’t answer exactly the same questions. I do feel it’s a bit out of date (5.1 v 5.2) although there’s not much in the test that was ‘minor version specific’ as I recall.

Welcome to the fold!

Overall it was actually harder than I expected (although I passed). A lot of the questions I felt were impractical without the PHP reference manual (for looking up function parameter lists, for example), but overall I feel like it was a pretty good test of the language

I’ve since done the ZCE, as my employer was paying, and much like you, found some of the questions ambiguous – some were either typos or trick questions, and it was impossible to know which of those two rather unsatisfactory conclusions to draw.

Either way, I don’t believe it proves much in itself. I’d rather a candidate bring a respectable degree, a stack of experience and a lot of common sense.

I spent about 10 minutes of the test time writing feedback comments on the questions to express my confusion at the wording of the question or of the answers. I will also go on record that there were a few questions I had that asked things like “the best way to do X is _____” – extremely subjective, and arguments could be persuasively made for multiple answers. This is a gift/curse I have – to see any and all possible ambiguities. Not having anyone to ask for clarification made the stress of taking a timed test worse.

The market’s pretty hoppin’ right now. The biggest drawback is that the salary/payment range for PHP developers, on the whole, doesn’t seem to be quite as high as for Java or .Net developers. This is just my experience, but there seem to be more positions Java/.Net positions which pay a higher amount (say, for example, over $100,000US per year) than PHP positions. That’s not to say there are no high paying PHP positions, but not as many of them, on average.

Many organizations have grown up with PHP over the past several years than they have a significant investment in it, and are reluctant to throw it all away and start over. So the market for people with strong PHP skills who can come in and take over older code and continue to work with it will be strong for the next several years, at least.

As a slight plug, my new book talks about the PHP job market. It’s aimed at early- to mid-stage developers.

Good luck!

I’m currently studying for the exam, hoping to take it late June…so far the ZCE has forced me to learn things you miss out on when just using the PHP manual as a reference point, detailed sections on things like Arrays, Strings, Type conversion were overlooked and often caused problems during development but now understanding exactly how the language works I feel has made me a better developer because of my increased understanding…and anything which gives me the edge over another developer in an interview and ability to hustle boss into a pay rise MUST be a good thing right???

@Richard – ZCE defo shows you are in touch with industry and have the basic understanding which is sometimes missed when people are self taught…I think problem solving skills should also be tested too to ensure the candidate can apply their knowledge

I feel I am a better coder because I have studied. I will not waste my time to take the Zend Certification exam again.