Starting down the road to certification

[Graham Smith]

Hi everyone,

I've been a professional developer for about 15 years now but because I've always worked for small companies that don't believe in / don't have money for training I've never acquired any certification. It's time for me to move on to pastures new and I think it would probably help if I could point to a few bits of paper that show I have the skills I claim. The bulk of my experience has been in the Java EE space but I've also done a bit of Java SE work, in recent years I've started managing projects as much as working on them though. I was thinking that the "Oracle Certified Master, Java EE 6 Enterprise Architect" certification would be the route to go starting with the "Java EE 6 Enterprise Architect Certified Master Exam 1Z0-807" exam. I'm a bit disappointed that there isn't a series of EE7 exams as I've already migrated some of the projects I work on to EE7 so studying for EE6 certification feels like a bit of a backwards step.

I'm also currently studying for the PRINCE2 exam (project management) and will probably sit ITIL afterwards.

Any advice?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Graham,
Welcome to CodeRanch!

What kind of job do you want? Someone who has a project management, process and architecture certification doesn't sound hands on to me at all. Whereas you sound like you do both. You might want to have two resumes to highlight your different skills.

The OCMEA isn't the swiftest exam to upgrade. It was a long time before the Java EE 6 exam came out in the first place. In a resume, someone is going to look that you are certified. The exact version doesn't matter. Notice how I said exact. Someone certified on Java EE 2 isn't going to impress me - let's dust off those old BMP's shall we?

[Graham Smith]

Thanks Jeanne,

You are correct in guessing that at the moment I do a bit of everything, that's just the reality of working for a small company. I still enjoy banging out some code but over the last few years I've come to find the architecture and project management side of things more interesting. Unfortunately where I live tech jobs are a bit thin on the ground so to some extent I'll have to take what I can get hence the broader than usual focus.

I tailor my resume for the job I'm applying for to highlight whatever aspects I think are best for that job, once I've applied for a few jobs I can usually then just pick the closest match.

No worries about certification versions here, I'd always try to stay up to date until I'm sure I don't need them any more. I honestly don't know if I could bring myself to work on a project that was pre-JavaEE 5 now anyway.