4 YEARS AGO

Update: Tips for becoming a certified Xperience developer

It seems like a hot topic at the office these days. Everyone wants to get certified in their specific areas. As my team specializes on development with Kentico, i'd like to help them out by providing my experiences hopefully resulting in a succesfull outcome.

Xperience certified developer exam overview

Taken from the preparation guide: "The Kentico Certified Developer Exam is securely administered online and consists of 50 questions to be completed within 90 minutes. The Exam is an open - book test – you may use any resource that you find helpful (have Kentico running, have the documentation open, etc.) except another person. You must take the exam individually; sharing or cheating will not be tolerated and will result in the disqualification of your current and future exams."

If you get a minimum score of 70%, you receive the Kentico Developer Certification. The benefits include:

  • Xperience certified logo: Add the Xperience certified logo on your business cards, email signatures, and résumé to demonstrate your expertise.
  • Xperience certified online badge: Use the online badge within Xperience forums to highlight your expertise in development
  • Xperience certified certificate: Prove your qualification as an Xperience implementation expert.
  • Xperience Certified Developer group membership: Share your knowledge with other Xperience Certified Developers on LinkedIn.

Tips to increase your success

Please find below a list of tips that helped me passing my tests:

  1. Take the sample questions from the prep guide.
  2. Read about the project phases at the Kentico Advantage website
  3. Make sure that your are rested and relaxed. I prefer to do the test in the morning / afternoon in the weekend and not in the evening or even worse in the night after a day at the office ;)
  4. Startup a local installation (before you start the exam) of Kentico with preferbly the Dancing Goat MVC site. As the preparation guide states it is allowed to use these resources.
  5. Open several Kentico guides for quick reference. My favorites are: Documentation, API reference, E-commerce features, On-line marketing features, Content Staging, Continuous Integration, Macro expressions
  6. Fire up Visual Studio and open the Kentico website and use the power of it's intellisense to get fast info on the Kentico API, methods and it's overloads.
  7. Use the Macro Browser located at /CMSAdminControls/UI/Macros/Dialogs/ObjectBrowser.aspx if you come across K# questions.
  8. Google is your friend. I prefer to do a search via: site:kentico.com your searchterm here

If you feel confident after reading this post then I advise you to sign up for the exam via the following link. Good luck!

Throwback thursday tips

If you are planning to take any older v6 – v11 exams (if still possible) you might run into questions regarding Azure and the Intranet solution. These topics are not part of the v12 exam anymore.

You can also download developer certification guides for Xperience 11 and Xperience 10.

Further reading