Hi Again!
I had taken an interview of a person having 4 certifications:
1.
SCJP 1.4
2. SCWCD 1.4
3. SCBCD 1.4
4. OCP 9i
And I did not see enough potential in him carrying so many goody ceritifcates. May be he had done ceritifcatioins long time back and he did not retain the knowledge till he gave this interview.
Anyway, the point here is IF you are mentioning your certificates in your resume and submitting a resume somewhere, make sure you prove your knowledge too.
When I took the interview it was for the client of my company; the same client I am working for. My company wanted me to screen this guy first before passing his resume to client. Since I knew technical requirements of the department the candidate is going to be interviewed for by client, I concentrated questions surounding to that aspect only. The requirement was for sound knowledge of
java I/O and Collecions framework. OOPS and good communication skill was anyway MUST. Primary knowledge of SQL was mandatory where good knowledge was a plus.
Do certifications help? Of course yes, nobody wants to waste time. Your resume would be shortlisted first than those who dont have any certifications. It all depends on a company's requirement. For some companies, the total IT experience may be more important than a ceritifcation in required technical area.
Since you are 2+ yr expereinced developer, I would recommend you to strongly prepare for Core Java and
Servlets technologies. Typical common interview questions would be following:
1. Collection framework: Different types of data structures, difference between them (e.g. difference between hashtable and hashmap, all things like that) which one is better in a given scenario.
2. Questions on Java Multithreading
3. Questions on Java I/O
4. Questions on Servlet's life cycle, init(), destroy(), threadsafe-ness, SingleThreadModel
5. In a servlet, different ways of forwarding request to another JSP/servlet, there are 3 ways (include/forward/sendRedirect): difference between those 3 ways
6.
JSP lifecycle
7. Different JSP scopes, useBean
8. Questions on
patterns (This is very vast topic, questions asked by you highly depend on knowledge of interviewer himself :-) )
ALL THE BEST!
[ June 19, 2005: Message edited by: Anand Wadhwani ]